Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who has dropped roughly $50 million in an effort to elect Republicans this election season, penned an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in which he explains why he left the Democratic Party, or as the headline of the piece says, “I didn't leave the Democrats. They left me.”
Adelson writes that he differs with Republicans “on several social issues,” and he says of Democrats that the party’s "new attitude toward Israel” troubles him. While he does not name any politician who has slighted Israel, he asserts that there is now “a visceral anti-Israel movement among rank-and-file Democrats, a disturbing development that my parents' generation would not have ignored.”
Adelson points to a chaotic vote during this year’s Democratic National Convention in which delegates booed the addition of language to the party platform that included a reference to God and that named Jerusalem the capital of Israel. “Anyone who witnessed the delegates' angry screaming and fist-shaking could see that far more is going on in the Democratic Party than mere opposition to citing Jerusalem in their platform,” he wrote.
He also claims that in states like California, Illinois and New York, “liberal policies simply don't deliver on their promises of social justice.”
Adelson concludes: “As a person who has been able to rise from poverty to affluence, and who has created jobs and work benefits for tens of thousands of families, I feel obligated to speak up and support the American ideals I grew up with—charity, self-reliance, accountability. These are the age-old virtues that help make our communities prosperous. Yet, sadly, the Democratic Party no longer seems to value them as it once did. That's why I switched parties, and why I'm now giving amply to Republicans.”
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