Stephanie Clayton won her fourth term in the Kansas legislature as a moderate Republican but when she started in office this month, she did so as a Democrat. She says she had an abrupt change of heart about a month after the November election last year.
It was the day Republican legislative leaders said they wanted to rewrite a school-finance bill that Clayton and other moderate Republicans had worked alongside Democrats to pass in last year’s session. For her, it was a breaking point.
“I thought, ‘I really can’t do this anymore,’ ” she says. “By the 12th I was being asked to switch parties” and by the 19th, she had.
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