Kyle Wilson replies

In today's morning take, Blois Olson reports on the email he received from Kyle Wilson in response to his reporting on Friday that Wilson used to be a Republican organizer.

Do you want the long answer or the short answer? The short answer is that I am not a Republican anymore and do not support the party. I consider myself pretty progressive these days actually and I would say that Bernie Sanders matches my views the closest out of any sitting politician.

If Kyle says he's a Democrat - and if he is claims to be most similar to Bernie Sanders that technically makes him a socialist - then I take him at his word.

I do, however, think that it's disingenuous to fail to disclose beforehand that he used to be a Republican. This is the point I made in the comments of my post on Friday in response to this comment from fellow contributor EricF:

I don't know Wilson but to make a defense of sorts, I was rather conservative when I was young too. I grew out of it and maybe Wilson did too. People can change over seven years, especially when they're young. That's not the case if he was working for the GOP last year, but taking the word of an anonymous tipster is someplace I'm not ready to go. All I know of him is what I saw during the Q&A at the SD61 central committee meeting, which is not much to go on admittedly, but he seemed sincere.

Just want to mention that two liberal media figures, Karl Frisch and Cenk Uygur, claim to have been Republicans in 2000, and they were past college age. So I just don't put stock in what someone was back in college.

Eric is completely correct in saying that people change their viewpoints over time. Back in high school I read a lot of Ayn Rand, so I know about that kind of thing myself. But nowhere on Kyle's website that I could find as of this writing does he acknowledge his past political views.

It's this self-acknowledgement that allows someone to have credibility when they change their partisan stripes. Both of the people that EricF mentions; Karl Frisch and Cenk Uygur will readily admit their past political affiliations.

In the case of Kyle Wilson however, he had to be prodded to disclose his past and that's the reason for the suspicion.