Still, the majority of ordinary Republican voters showed little sign of abandoning Trump and his political movement. And last week, top Republican lawmakers began to come to terms with that.
Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, voted on Tuesday with all but five members of his party in the Senate to reject Trump’s impeachment trial, even after privately indicating to colleagues that he thought the former president he deserved to be removed.
This dynamic – of Democrats united by a majority of independents, but Republicans firmly on the other side – appears in some important results of a Pew Research Center poll released last week. Pew asked Americans to assess their top priorities for the new government. On some issues, party differences were not particularly strong. But on the most talked-about issues facing the country, Republicans and Democrats have split up decisively.
While the majority in both parties considered it important for the federal government to confront the coronavirus pandemic, Democrats and independents who leaned towards the Democratic Party were 33 percentage points more likely to say that than Republicans and Republican-backed independents . On climate change, one of the top priorities of the Biden administration, the divide was even greater: three out of five Democrats thought it was an urgent concern, but only 14% of Republicans did.
There was a similar chasm in racial justice. While 72 percent of Democrats said that dealing with racial issues should be a major political concern, only 24 percent of Republicans said so. While there have always been differences between Republicans and Democrats about the importance of addressing racial disparities – and about the role of the federal government in doing so – the difference can now be greater than ever.
In part, this is due to the fact that Democrats and Democratic-inclined independent voters, especially whites, have come a long way on these issues in recent years. Meanwhile, Republicans, spurred on by Trump’s hostility policy, have only become more skeptical of the arguments for racial justice.
Of the main political issues the country faces, in only one – dealing with the economy and jobs – the vast majority in both parties said the government should invest a lot of energy. Eighty-five percent of Republicans said that dealing with the economy should be a priority, as well as 75% of Democrats.