The Republican Party could get a lot smaller if former President Donald Trump decides to create his own third party.
More than half, 53.5%, of Trump supporters responded in a recent USA Today/Suffolk Poll that they feel more loyalty to the former commander in chief than they do to the party he led for four years. Only a third of the 1,000 respondents said their loyalty is to the party as opposed to Trump himself.
Following the end of the former president’s term, which unceremoniously ended with Trump’s second impeachment in the House and acquittal in the Senate, there was speculation that Trump could form his own party. If he did that, 46% of respondents said they’d support Trump’s party over the GOP.
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Conversely, slightly more than a quarter of those surveyed said they would stick with the Republican Party, while roughly the same percentage said they were undecided as to which party they would support.
The former president’s stranglehold on the party is also evident given that more than half of the people surveyed, 58.9%, want him to run for president in 2024, while 75% say they’d support him in the Republican primary, and 85% said they’d vote for him in the next general election.
Last week, the president declined to comment as to whether he planned on running, saying, “I won’t say yet, but we have tremendous support. I’m looking at poll numbers that are through the roof.” He will be speaking at the annual CPAC conference later this week in his first public address since leaving office.
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About half of the Trump supporters surveyed in the poll, conducted from Feb. 15-20, with a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points, believe the Republican Party “needs to become more loyal to Trump, even at the cost of losing more establishment Republicans,” while about 20% believe the party should become “less loyal to Trump and more aligned with” establishment Republicans.
