Top political defections

When Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter announced that he would switch from the Republican to the Democratic Party, it send shock waves through Congress.

It probably shouldn’t have.

Specter was growing increasingly at odds with the Republican power structure and stood a good chance of failing in his bid for re-election. Moving across the aisle may have reflected a closer alliance with current Democratic ideology, but it was also a matter of political survival.

In honor of the event, Time looked back on some of the top defections in U.S. political history. Here’s what they came up with:

Arlen Specter, 2009: Republican to Democrat

Theodore Roosevelt, 1912: Republican to Bull Moose

Wendell Willkie, 1939: Democrat to Republican

Hillary Clinton, 1960s: Republican to Democrat

Ronald Reagan, 1962: Democrat to Republican

Strom Thurmond, 1964: Democrat to Republican

Condoleezza Rice, 1982: Democrat to Republican

Richard Shelby, 1994: Democrat to Republican

Michael Bloomberg, 2001: Democrat to Republican

Jim Jeffords, 2001: Republican to Independent

To read more about the reasoning behind these decisions, visit Time.

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