Democratic lawmaker immediately defects to GOP after winning re-election

Florida state Rep. Susan Valdés announced Monday she is defecting to the Republican Party — immediately after being re-elected as a Democrat.

Valdés, a Cuban-American lawmaker who was raised by immigrants in New York, represents a Tampa area district.

"I have spent my adult life fighting to give a voice to the people of my West Tampa home," she wrote. "I have done so as a Democrat partly out of habit — I come from a family of Democrats — and partly because I believed the Democrats were the party most concerned with the working families I represent."

However, she added, "I will not waste my final two years in the Florida Legislature being ignored in a caucus whose leadership expects me to ignore the needs of my community."

"I will continue to fight every day to benefit the people of West Tampa, Hillsborough County and the state of Florida," she concluded. "And in my heart, I know the best way to do that is to stand with Speaker [Daniel] Perez and join the Republican supermajority in the Florida House of Representatives.

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Valdés did not explicitly list a reason for abandoning Democrats in her statement. However, it comes just a week after she lost a campaign to chair the Hillsborough County Democratic Executive Committee.

Furthermore, last year, she was one of a small handful of Democrats who crossed the aisle to support a massive school voucher program championed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. This was also a precipitating issue cited by North Carolina state Rep. Tricia Cotham, who also infamously defected to the GOP last year, giving the party there a supermajority in the legislature that they narrowly lost this year, as well as Georgia state Rep. Mesha Mainor, who was defeated after defecting in the election last month.

Critics have said school voucher programs, touted as giving parents "choice" to move their tax dollars to private education, consistently worsen education outcomes while enriching a small group of wealthy parents already outside the public school system.