Republicans, by double-digit margins, said they were willing to leave their party to follow former President Donald Trump if he left on his own, according to a new poll released Sunday.
Republican Party members by 46 percent to 27 percent said they would put the Republican Party in the rear view mirror if Trump creates his own, a USA Today / Suffolk University survey found.
“We feel that Republicans are not fighting enough for us and we all see Donald Trump fighting for us as hard as he can, every day,” said Brandon Keidl, 27, a Republican and small business owner in Milwaukee. The researchers.
“But then you have Republicans who just agree with Democrats and everything, and they never back down,” he said.
Half of the respondents said they think the Republican Party should be “more loyal to Trump” – even if it means losing support from those in the Republican Party establishment.
Nineteen percent said the party should move away from Trump.
The poll showed that Trump’s support has remained strong since he was acquitted in a Senate impeachment trial for inciting his supporters to march on the Capitol on January 6.
Trump will deliver the keynote speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando on February 28.
He will speak about “the future of the Republican Party and the conservative movement”.
Trump, who has hosted Republican lawmakers at his resort in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, since President Biden was sworn in on January 20, has pledged to retaliate against Republican congressmen who did not support him during impeachment hearings.
Earlier this month, he criticized Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell as a “staunch political hacker” who should be removed from office.
“The Republican Party will never again be respected or strong with political ‘leaders’ like Senator Mitch McConnell at his command,” Trump said in a statement.
McConnell (R-Ky.) Voted for Trump’s acquittal of “incitement to insurrection”, but provoked his ire when he said the former president was “practically and morally responsible” for the confusion in a speech on the floor moments later.
In the House, 10 Republicans voted for impeachment, while seven senators crossed the corridor to condemn him.
Eighty percent of Republicans in the poll said they would not support a Republican candidate who voted to be sentenced – a show of strong support for Trump, who said he would try to recruit candidates to run against them in the primary elections.
Francis Zovko, 63, a Republican from Jefferson Hills, Pennsylvania, told polls that Trump does not need to create a third party.
“I think he will just, you know, take over the Republican Party, just like he did in 2016,” he said. “Everyone thought he was a big joke and, in the end, they weren’t laughing anymore.”
The poll interviewed 1,000 Trump voters between February 15 and 19.
It has a margin of error of more or less 3.1 percentage points.