Notorious RINO Blake Ashby of Missouri has officially switched sides, announcing in a video on social media that he is now a registered Democrat and generating a wave of backlash from conservatives, who mocked the former Republican congressman for his decision, which he described as a reaction to the Trump Administration.
For context, in a video shared on April 27, 2025, Rep. Blake Ashby (D-MO) explained that he had decided to officially register as a Democrat, acknowledging the party’s challenges but arguing that moving to the left was worthwhile due to his grievances with the Trump Administration. In his video, Rep. Ashby described the Republican Party as an “intellectual disaster” and said that he was “all in” and would do anything he could to help Democrats reclaim the House of Representatives.
In the video, Rep. Ashby began by declaring, “I am now officially a Democrat,” going on to say that he had changed his registration in his home state of Missouri and adding, “[It] Took me a long time to get here, and I know the Democratic Party has its own challenges, but the challenges of the Democratic Party are nothing like the intellectual disaster that is the current Republican Party.” The congressman then said that his decision to switch parties was based “primarily on economic issues.”
Continuing, the representative described himself as having been a “traditional moderate Republican,” adding, “I believed in fiscal sanity and socially letting people do what they wanted as long as it didn’t impact others.” Rep. Ashby clarified that he no longer believed that these values were upheld by the Republican Party, saying, “The Republican Party has no connection to what I just said anymore.”
Next, Rep. Ashby made the case that the Republican Party entered an identity crisis in the Reagan era, describing former President Ronald Reagan as “a president I liked and respected.” He added that under Reagan, “The Republican Party started backing away from fiscal sanity. They bought into this idea that they could create massive deficits through tax cuts, and those tax cuts would create so much new economic activity that the tax cuts would eventually pay for themselves and the budget would come back into balance.”
Moving on, the RINO congressman described Reaganomics as a failure, calling budget deficits “morally wrong and bad for our economy,” arguing that the philosophy of the current Republican Party “undermined our economy.” He added that the last president who, in his eyes, “had our last balanced budget,” was Bill Clinton, adding, “Unfortunately, it was the next Republican president, George HW Bush, who…put us on the path to the massive deficits we have right now, as much as my memory says it’s the Republican Party that is more fiscally prudent. ”
Concluding his statement, Rep. Ashby said that he believed the Democratic Party had done “a better job of balancing our budget and managing our economy,” adding, “So, I’m all in.” Furthermore, the congressman updated his personal website to read, “Blake formally joined the Democratic Party earlier this year and is actively working to do anything he can to help the party win in the 2026 midterm elections.”
When Rep. Ashby’s video was posted on X, conservatives savagely roasted him, with the user Trumpgirl21tx saying, “At this point of time, only an idiot would flip to a Democrat.” Another user chimed in with a searing criticism of Rep. Ashby’s political history, saying, “his guy is as fake as they come. He’s portraying himself as a former Republican, but he was a poser. He’s running protest campaigns against the Republican party dating back to 2004. He ran as a Better Party candidate in 2024 and lost.”
Watch the clip:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video
