Republicans said with double-digit margins that they are willing to leave their party to follow former President Donald Trump if he breaks out alone, according to a new poll released Sunday.
Members of the GOP at 46 percent to 27 percent said they would put the Republican party in the rear-view mirror if Trump created his own, a USA Today / Suffolk University poll found.
“We feel like Republicans aren’t fighting for us enough, and we all see Donald Trump fighting for us as hard as he can every day,” said Brandon Keidl, 27, a Republican small business owner from Milwaukee. the pollsters.
“But then you have established Republicans who just agree with established Democrats and things, and they never push back,” he said.
Half of those polled said they think the Republican Party should be “more loyal to Trump” – even if it means losing the support of those in the GOP establishment.
Nineteen percent said the party should withdraw from Trump.
The investigation found that Trump’s support remains strong since he was acquitted in a Senate impeachment trial for inciting his supporters to march to the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Trump will deliver the keynote address at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando on Feb. 28.
He will talk about “the future of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.”
Trump, who has hosted Republican lawmakers at his Mar-a-Lago Florida resort since President Biden was inaugurated Jan. 20, has vowed to retaliate against members of the GOP Congress who did not support him in the impeachment hearings.
Earlier this month, he condemned Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell as a “non-smiling political hacker” who should be thrown from office.
“The Republican Party can never again become respected or strong with political ‘leaders’ like Senator Mitch McConnell at the helm,” Trump said in a statement.
McConnell (R-Ky.) Voted to absolve Trump of “inciting insurrection,” but was furious when he said the former president was “practically and morally responsible” for the chaos in a speech on the ground a little later .
In the House, 10 Republicans voted to impeach while seven senators crossed the aisle to convict him.
Eighty percent of Republicans in the poll said they would not support a Republican candidate who voted for conviction – a show of strong support for Trump, who has said he would try to recruit candidates to stand up against them in primaries.
Francis Zovko, 63, a Republican from Jefferson Hills, Pa., Told pollsters Trump doesn’t need to create a third party.
“I think he’s just, you know, going to take over the Republican Party, just like he did in 2016,” he said. “They all thought he was a big joke, and by the end they stopped laughing.”
The poll of 1,000 Trump voters between February 15 and February 19.
It has a plus or minus 3.1 percentage point margin of error.