In a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled "I Didn't Leave the Democrats. They Left me", Adelson specifies three reasons why he switched political parties. First, he cites foreign policy, pointing to a Gallup poll that suggests Republicans are more supportive of Israel than Democrats.[27] Second, he cites statistics that suggest Republicans are more charitable than Democrats. To support this claim Adelson adduces a report from the Chronicle of Philanthropy which found, after studying tax data from the IRS, that U.S. states which vote Republican are more generous to charities than those states which vote Democratic. "My father, who kept a charity box for the poor in our house," he writes, "would have frowned on this fact about modern Democrats."[28] This leads him to his third reason—economic policy—for leaving the Democratic Party. He writes:
Democrats would reply that taxation and government services are better vehicles for helping the underprivileged. And, yes, government certainly has its role. But when you look at states where Democrats have enjoyed years of one-party dominance—California, Illinois, New York—you find that their liberal policies simply don't deliver on their promises of social justice. Take, for example, President Obama's adopted home state. In October, a nonpartisan study of Illinois's finances by the State Budget Crisis Task Force offered painful evidence that liberal Illinois is suffering from abject economic, demographic and social decline. With the worst credit rating in the country, and with the second-biggest public debt per capita, the Prairie State "has been doing back flips on a high wire, without a net," according to the report.
