Dearly Beloved: Was Prince Really a Republican?

• By: Heat Street Staff
• April 23, 2016, 8:22 pm

As the world waits to find out what killed Prince, his fans have flooded the Internet to debate a question of even greater mystery: was Prince really a Republican?

That’s right – the musician actually left behind signs, in his writings and public statements, even in his political donations, that he was a religious conservative. A meme has been flying around the web, featuring a long quote purportedly from Prince affirming his fealty to the Republican party.

We can find no real evidence that Prince ever actually said this. However, there actually is evidence that point to what at the least could be Republican sympathies:

• Prince was raised as a Seventh Day Adventist and later became a Jehovah’s Witness (religions that both have very conservative views).
• Prince appeared to come out against gay marriage to the New Yorker magazine in 2008, saying, “God came to earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever, and he just cleared it all out,” he told the magazine. “He was, like, ‘Enough’.”
• His only political donation was to the Senate campaign of Republican Rudy Boschwitz, in 1990 (Boschwitz lost).
• His lyrics are imbued with religious and directly Christian themes.

It’s pretty clear that if Prince was GOP, he didn’t actually vote on it. The star said in a TV interview that, as a Jehovah’s witness, he could not do so.

Former MSNBC commentator and tax delinquent “Toure”, who wrote a biography of Prince, said on Bloomberg this week that Prince was “a conservative, a Republican”.

As for evidence to the contrary, you need only watch a highly sexually charged Prince performance to doubt he’d feel comfortable at a Rotary dinner with a bunch of Republicans. If Prince really was a Republican, then he occupied the furthest, darkest corner of Ronald Reagan’s proverbial “big tent”.

But then again, this is Prince we’re talking about.

Read about theories of how Prince died.