Nearly half of Republicans wouldn’t hesitate to drop the GOP and join a new party led by former President Donald Trump, according to a Suffolk University/USA Today poll of Trump voters released Sunday. The poll revealed that 46 percent said they would abandon their party while only 27 percent said they wouldn’t drop the GOP. The rest are undecided. Half of the Trump voters polled said that the GOP should be “more loyal to Trump.” Only 19 percent said the opposite and think the Republican Party should be less loyal to Trump. “We feel like Republicans don’t fight enough for us, and we all see Donald Trump fighting for us as hard as he can, every single day,” a small-business owner from Milwaukee said.
The poll showed that Trump voters are far more loyal to the former president than to the Republican Party. While 54 percent of those polled said they were loyal to Trump, only 34 percent said they were loyal to the party. The figures put into sharp focus the dilemma that Republican leaders are facing as they try to adjust to a post-Trump world. Trump has sharply criticized Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who voted to acquit the former president in the impeachment trial but then said the former president was “morally” responsible for the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. “Mitch is a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack, and if Republican Senators are going to stay with him, they will not win again,” Trump said.
