Former California State Senate Democratic Majority Leader Gloria Romero announced her decision at a press conference hosted by Republican commentator Steve Hilton, who livestreamed it on his X account. She was joined by several leading Republican legislators.

“In this Capitol behind me, I served as both Senate Democratic Caucus chair and the Senate majority leader. But today I say goodbye. Adios! I’ve had enough,” she said.

Romero recalled her role as the Democratic convention delegate for the Rev. Jesse Jackson, then for former President Barack Obama at three separate conventions. She said her heroes growing up were Democratic titans Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Robert F. Kennedy.

“This is not the Democratic Party that I once championed,” she said. “I do not recognize it anymore, and I cannot continue. I changed my voting registration today as the sun was rising to Republican, which has, under Donald Trump, become the champion of working people … and indeed, I will vote for Donald Trump this fall.”

For her reasoning, she accused the Democrats of stifling democracy, going so far as to compare them to Latin American dictators. She said the party rigs primaries against candidates, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and executed a “political coup” against President Joe Biden.

Romero also hit the Democrats on women’s rights, criticizing the undermining of Title IX protections, and going too far on abortion. Immigration, crime, and the rising cost of living were topics of her criticism as well.

“But perhaps my biggest disconnect with my old party now has been over school choice, education freedom, and the right to have quality schools for all, especially as congressman Kevin Kiley and I have fought together, especially for school choice for poor and minority children who are trapped in chronically failing schools,” she added.

Romero concluded that she left the party “with sadness, but it is with the belief that this is best for the future. I stayed for as long as I could. I tried reforms, I spoke out, I voted. Today, I turn to the future. A land of opportunity and free speech. I am excited to join a party that was started by the greatest American, Abraham Lincoln, and the challenges of building a new great republic.”

After leaving office in 2010, Romero has been increasingly critical of the Democratic Party. In a November 2021 op-ed for the California Globe, she warned about a decline of the party unless an overhaul was undertaken.

“As a lifetime Democrat, I am horrified to see a Democratic Party I once revered—a party that sent us to the moon and back and inspired a new generation of youth like me with messaging replete with opportunity, hope, optimism, and belief in working-class Americans—now on the path to irrelevance and political extinction across major swaths of our country,” she wrote.