Last fall, Kyle Sweetser was a Republican, but an unhappy one. For the third time in a row, Donald Trump had secured his party’s nomination for president — this time without anyone being able to credibly deny what MAGA actually meant for America. The GOP candidate had already been president once, during which time he floated bleach as an antiviral and rejected the outcome of a free and fair election, urging a mob of his supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol and demand that he remain in power despite a majority of Americans asking him to leave.
As a small businessman in Mobile, Alabama, Sweetser, who voted for Trump the first time around, had been hurt by the president’s rejection of a traditional conservative value: free trade. Tariffs on steel imports had raised costs for his construction firm, but the president, from his perspective, seemed unperturbed by the impacts of his erratic approach to trade policy. Still, what was a Republican to do in 2020: Vote Democrat?
By 2024, Sweetser was indeed ready to betray his longtime Republican partisanship. The Jan. 6 insurrection made it impossible to deny that Trump poses a threat to American democracy; his refusal to condemn Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine showed that he was unwilling to defend it abroad, either. Standing in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia last October, Sweetser — by then an active participant in “Republican Voters Against Trump,” the brainchild of former GOP strategist Sarah Longwell — spoke to Salon about why he was ditching “tribalism” and backing the Democratic nominee: then-Vice President Kamala Harris.
The turning point wasn’t any one thing, Sweetser told Salon at the time, but simply opening his eyes and ears. “I started to pay attention to things that he said,” he explained. And those things, as longtime listeners can attest, are often at odds with reality, any notion of personal responsibility and arguably even conservatism itself — at least the variety that values free markets and constitutional governance over devotion to one man who cares little about either.
The November election was the final straw in terms of party registration. Today, though, Sweetser is not just a registered Democrat but is hoping to be the Democratic candidate next year who takes on U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala. As with convincing Republicans to turn on Trump, he has chosen an uphill battle in what is practically a one-party state: the last time Alabama sent a Democrat to the Senate it was because the Republican nominee was accused of soliciting sex from minors.
Speaking this month with Salon, Sweetser, a married father of two, explained why he ditched the GOP and why he thinks many in Alabama may be willing to do the same by the 2026 elections.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Salon: We spoke briefly right in front of Independence Hall, something like six months ago, and back then you were still a Republican against Trump. How did you end up becoming a Democrat against Trump? What happened to make you switch?
Sweetser: So basically, you know, to put things bluntly, that was like a last-ditch effort, really, to try to stop the direction the GOP was going. After 2020, specifically after January 6, I decided to do everything in my power to kind of fight against — speak out against — the direction the GOP was going in. Aside from economic issues, I noticed, you know, societal issues, especially down here in the South. My wife is half Thai and going in and out of houses and working in construction, people are a lot more comfortable having people tell you that, basically, they hate immigrants. That is essentially what it boils down to. It just got to a point where, to me, it’s about not only helping our state, because this is taught behavior. They’re teaching people to be xenophobic, they’re teaching people now to be racist, and they’re teaching people to be sexist, and that was going away. So like I said, I decided I had to do everything for power to fight back against it.
When Nikki Haley hopped in, that was an opportunity for the Republican Party to kind of right the ship. I do feel, going back and looking and talking to people, you did have a lot of Republicans there, but there were a lot of Democrat crossovers as well that crossed over to try to help stop Trump through that means. [But] I mean, this was a long time coming. Like I said, I decided I really wasn’t a part of it. After 2021, feeling a bit politically homeless, I decided that, if we couldn’t stop them in the primaries, then there was really no place for socially liberal Republicans, if that makes sense; Republicans that are maybe fiscally conservative, or a moderate version of that with strong foreign policy. There’s really no place. … Some of the policies that Trump shifted to would be considered far left. And honestly, the truth behind it is, Kamala Harris, the way that she ran her campaign, hopping in there late was, I thought was excellent. She was more conservative than Trump on — as far as the principled conservative goes — on pretty much everything from her economic policy to her foreign policy, to her law-and-order stance and the Constitution.
If you look at Trump, and you look at his stance in those ways, he’s not a conservative — he’s a right-wing populist, which, unfortunately, these days, they’ve taken these terms and they kind of turn them on their head for political reasons. And so it really confuses people when you throw these terms out there, [but] a social conservative with no principles or values is not a conservative at all. But long story short, that was it. I mean, there was really no going back from that point. And I’ve been asked so many times, over and over and over again, to run as a Democrat in the state of Alabama. Alabama has huge issues. And yet, you look at our past couple races here, and the people at the top of the ticket lose by what, 20, 30 points.
To that point, do you feel like you’re going on a noble suicide mission?
Well, no, I mean, this is something that has to be done. There is a grand opportunity. It’s sad how the state of Alabama has been left by the Republican Party, and it’s a tragedy. But there is an opportunity here to install a two-party system again in our state. We’ve had one-party Republican rule for 15 years; 40% of our population lives in poverty, okay? Fifteen years of Republican rule: that’s a supermajority Republican state House, Republican state senate, office of the governor. Not only do they have that — and they have most of the judges in the Supreme Court — now you have a Republican U.S. Senate, Republican U.S. House, Republican president. So they are literally the establishment. They’ve been the establishment here.
And you look at a lot of these guys, the chair of the Alabama Republican Party — he’s registered to vote in Tennessee. … Then you have Tommy Tuberville, who lives in a $6 million mansion in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida, spends most of his time there. … I mean, we are in bad shape down here. I’ll be honest with you: We’re in bad shape. I’m so proud of Alabama. I’m proud of the people that live here. But the bottom line is that 40% of our population lives in poverty, and we die quicker than everybody else in the United States, almost; we’re 49th in life expectancy, and a lot of that is related to poverty. People don’t have the access or the ability to get the health care that they need. We’ve got sky-high infant mortality rates here, likely due to poverty.
You’ve got sewage infrastructure that is falling apart and overflowing into our waterways and the Republican Party can’t get it together. They can’t use their political capital to rebuild this infrastructure. Just a few weeks ago, we had 4 million gallons of sewage during a storm, 4 million gallons, come out it and much of it ends up in our waterways, that then goes down to Mobile Bay; that affects our seafood industry; that affects Baldwin County; Alabama’s multi-billion dollar tourism industry — we’ve got nice beaches down here; that affects recreational fishermen; that affects people swimming in the water. … And this stuff doesn’t get reported on the way that it needs to. We just get left behind.
And a lot of that is what really spoke to people in the state of Alabama: just feeling left behind always. But they [the local GOP] were able to use this where it really should have been kind of focused in on the Republican Party here, and the failings of the Republican Party, and turn it onto the federal government. And it was effective. It worked for someone like me. And as I got into this stuff, I started understanding, I started learning a lot more, I started to change my mind about things.
Right now, our state is not being served by somebody like Tommy Tuberville, and you can replace them with any other kind of guy, and they’re just going to do the same thing. You look at his record, and specifically, I think, two years in, [Sen.] Katie Britt, [she] was at $200 million, bringing in $200 million to the state of Alabama, when Tommy Tuberville was at like $67 million — absolutely pathetic.
That’s what you get when you got a guy that lives in a multi-million-dollar beach house in Florida. The state party fails to hold this guy accountable. And you know, you show up to vote and you’ve got an all Republican and all Democrat bubble on your ticket, and so people don’t pay attention, but you look down that ticket and you see 50-60% or more are unopposed Republicans that win by default. So there is zero accountability. I would say they wouldn’t have any kind of principles, because they don’t have to.
So really, this is about rebuilding the Democratic Party and state of Alabama, bringing in the working class in the state of Alabama. I have a construction background. I have a small business background. I work in and out of people’s houses. I talk to people where they’re comfortable. I work in and out of chemical plants, manufacturing facilities, you name it. I’ve been in those places. I worked on an oil spill, the Deepwater Horizon, when it blew in the Gulf of Mexico. I worked on a boat as a small boat captain. I eventually was put on, as a civilian, a special task force with the Coast Guard. And I was the youngest captain on that task force by about 20 years. I put myself in danger to protect the environment, protect our beaches here, because it means a lot to me.
The Republicans, they failed here on the environment. … People love the outdoors, but Republicans have been failing us all the way across the board. But it has a lot to do with accountability. When you have zero accountability, then you end up with this.
As you well know, Alabama has had a long history of being a one-party state. Like 50 years ago, that one party was the Democrats. And you can get into the historical reasons there was the switch — you know, the Civil Rights Act and attempts by Republicans to explicitly appeal to white racial resentment, etc. — but my question is: How do you then break that one-party mentality? Because the only time it’s been broken in my memory is when the Republican candidate was accused of being a literal pedophile. Then a Democrat got elected.
You’re well aware of partisanship. I’ve had the same conversations with my family: that today’s Republican Party is not really conservative, but it falls back to, “Well, we don’t like liberals, and the liberals want to abort babies and make kids trans” and all this stuff. It’s about what they’re against, not what they’re for. How do you counter that mentality where it’s, like, you don’t have to love every Republican, but you know the Democrats, your whole life, you’ve been told that they are the enemy.
We pick a new fight. We pick new fights and new battles. We don’t fall into the same battles where Democrats lose over and over again. And we can fight on these same issues, especially in the state of Alabama. For instance, the supposed pro-life stance of the Republican Party, which is bogus, by the way, in our state — what direction do they go from this point? … Because they have to keep going somewhere, it has to keep rolling or it shuts down. So the direction, as far as I can tell, that they’re going is: they want to track women across state lines, like cattle. … I mean, it would be an egregious step…. They especially talked about this a lot last year, going after people, legally, for going to clinics out of the state or whatever. Well, how do you do that? Now you have to track people. That’s how you do it. My point is that this is the battle that we need to fight, because you will find probably a good majority of Republicans here will not agree with that. The government does not need to be tracking law-abiding citizens based on pregnancy. I mean, that’s just the bottom line.
Sure, so maybe you don’t refight the whole abortion battle, but you can point out that the government tracking women’s periods and movements around the state, that’s just — from a constitutional conservative perspective, that’s a little bit much.
Yeah, it’s too much. And to other Democrats, look: If you don’t draw a line and choose the fight that you can win, then you will continue to lose, and you will continue to lose your rights. So right now, that is the line. And another thing: We got to play like Republicans here, or the MAGA Republicans here, but we can use the truth instead of lies. Look at [Tennessee]. A state elected official in [Tennessee], a year or two ago, was trying to put a bill up for banning interracial marriages. I mean, could you imagine if a Democrat did something like that? It would be blown up all over the news, nonstop. It doesn’t matter what state it’s in: they would make the Democratic Party own that.
We need to make the Republican Party own that stuff. Because, to be completely honest, from talking to people in their houses, people believe that stuff [about Democrats]. We do not need to let that catch fire; we need to put that fire out. And the way to put that fire out is to put it out there and make them own. And guess what? We will all be better for if we make the Republican Party own policies like that, because then they’ll have to come out as a whole, and they will have to say they don’t agree with that, and then the people in their base that think that they are being served by this rhetoric, or whatever it is, will have to come to terms with that.
A lot of that is why we’re here today. There hasn’t been the pushback that we need, really, in our state. Like I was pointing to Tommy Tuberville living in Florida, and the vice chair of the RNC living in or having a driver’s license and registered to vote in Tennessee. I mean, come on, we have to start swinging. We have to start swinging hard against them — metaphorically, of course — and taking the fight to these people. And look, I get it: Doing all the activism that I’ve done over the past two years in trying to break through to people, I get it — when you get on their radar, you get hundreds, maybe thousands of threats. They threaten to destroy your business, they threaten to kill your family, they threaten to kill you. They threaten to end you forever, basically. And I get that people are scared, but I’m not scared, and I’m gonna take it to them.
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Is there anyone in the Democratic Party who you see as a model for the kind of campaign you would like to run or politician you would like to be? I’m thinking maybe even outside the Democratic Party, like Dan Osborn in the last cycle.
I look at everybody, and I try to take the best of what I can take, and that’s what we’re going with right now. … I’ll be honest though: Kamala Harris’ platform in 2024 was a surprise, and it was excellent. Obviously, you’re not going to agree with everything, but I think that was a definite movement in the right direction. And I just think that that’s something good to look at. And really how she spoke and did things and carried herself. She did excellent. I really appreciate what she did. And so hopefully we can stay in that direction, and we can focus on winning some of these voters over that have been kind of turned off by the whole system.
The state of Alabama, for instance, 2024: as big a motivated Trump country as we are, you look at the voter turnout. Out of all the people that registered, only 57% turned out for that. So we got 43% that were completely turned off. Then on top of that, you’ve got Trump isn’t going to be on the ballot in ‘26, so that’s going to chop into some of his people. So the goal is: One, to, like I said, target some of these socially liberal Republicans and win them over and move them over to the Democratic Party, because honestly, they’re better represented. And there’s going to be a lot of people there, they’re in a rock and a hard place, even if it’s 51% to 49%, what represents their interests, or what represents what they believe, a lot of these people, I don’t think they understand that the Democratic Party represents them better than the Republican Party. Looking at the economy, looking at the failures of the GOP in our state and how it’s led to these issues where we’ve got rural hospitals that are being closed, over 80% operate in the red. That’s rural Alabama — it’s going to get shut down by the new GOP policies trying to cut Medicaid.
You’ve mentioned a couple times now how Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign, you thought her platform was pretty solid and in some ways even conservative in the traditional sense. But at the end of the day, she lost. And some people take the lesson from that, especially for someone like you running in a state like Alabama, that the lesson is “we just gotta lean into being kind of Trump-lite; we gotta be a little harsher to immigrants; we gotta be a little bit harsher to trans people; we gotta be a little bit harsher to X, Y and Z; maybe give the police a lot more money.” Kind of be Trump, but competent.
What do you think of that whole debate, like the idea that the way to win in a state like yours is to be a more professional, intelligent MAGA Republican?
That ship has sailed. That’s something that I don’t think we’re going to see come back. And those guys are better off making a few concessions and coming over to the Democratic Party. Look at the economy: I’m running to represent the state, and the state’s interests, as a U.S. senator, and so I’m going to run based on, one, I lived in Alabama pretty much my whole life and I know people here. I know how our economy works. I’ve bled and sweat and helped build Alabama — personally, with my hands. Look, some of these other guys — all pretty much suits — they’ve taken that approach. This is a different approach that I’m taking and that we’re taking, and it’s going to be effective at winning people over. I don’t hope, I know it’s going to be effective at winning people over.
The Trump-lite thing to me is still disgusting. Because, as I said before, I’ve watched what his rhetoric is doing to people here. It’s teaching people to hate gay people, the LGBTQ community. It’s teaching people to hate immigrants. And there’s many cases that I could point to. … There was the whole Haitian immigrant thing. Well, they freaked out over in Baldwin County, and the local politicians, Republicans, held a town hall and acted like there were 1,000 people there. “Oh, the Haitians are coming here!” And they weren’t. They weren’t coming there. But what happened was, is because of that, people in Mobile — where I live, on the other side of the bay — started commenting and saying, “Oh, I saw some Haitian immigrants here today.” And then you realize now they’re just targeting people because of the color of their skin. We didn’t have any Haitian immigrants at the time, you what I’m saying?
I mean, this is horrible. And I don’t have a problem going toe to toe with these people and telling them they’re wrong and what they’re doing is wrong, because somebody’s got to do it. And you’ve got to do it loud, but you do have to do it right. In Tommy Tuberville’s case and the Republican Party’s case, you look at the whole LGBTQ, trans athletes stuff. I think there’s zero of these NCAA athletes that are in the state of Alabama; there’s like eight or something out of 175,000 NCAA athletes. While 40% of our state is in poverty, and we die quicker than everyone else. That is an absolute insult to the people of Alabama. People need to know it. It needs to be repeated, just like they repeat lies over and over and over again. The truth needs to be repeated over and over and over and over again. They are teaching people to hate — they are dividing people so they can literally steal from us. I mean, that’s the way I look at it, with these tariffs, which are regressive taxes, which hurt states like Alabama, where we have so many people in poverty because regressive taxes hurt lower-income individuals the most. It’s just like I said, I’m gonna bring it to them.
You talked about the tariffs right there, and you’ve talked about how Trump won’t be on the ballot in 2026. Without having you divulge all of your campaign strategy, I’m just curious how much you try to tie your opponent to Donald Trump, knowing that he has a kind of cult-like fan base that boosts the GOP turnout numbers during presidential years. Is it smart to run against Trump in 2026, you think? And I mean, obviously, a lot will happen between now and then; it might make having to run against Trump inevitable. But I’m just curious, tying Tommy Tuberville to Trump’s unpopular tariffs, to corruption with Qatar, all that kind of stuff — is that the way you think you win?
Well, you know, it’s going to be a day-to-day thing as things develop. But the way I win is by representing Alabama. That’s the way I win: by representing people here, by pointing to the issues that are the problem and making the Republican Party as a whole own these problems, because they are their problems. They are the establishment. They have been in the establishment. And this whole charade that they’re pulling, it can’t last. So what do they do? It’s more about, what are they going to do? I don’t think they can continue to run the social conservative campaign, because, like I said, they’re kind of like, where does it go from here? They keep going, right? So where is it going to go? Are they going to turn Alabama into a theocracy, like Iran, where women don’t have rights? I mean, what are they going to do? They’re there. They’re on the ledge. They went that direction. So now, what are they going to do? They can’t win on the economy. They sure can’t win on the economy, so we’ll see. But more than likely, what they’re going to do is they’re going to pick a minority group, and they’re going to blame that minority group, and they’re going to go across the media, they’re going to go use their social media influencers, and they’re going to villainize some minority group so they can divide people in Alabama. So that’s what I’m watching for: for them to do something like that, because that’s their playbook and that’s all they got while they steal from us.