For Traditional Republicans To Flee The Party Of Trump, They Need A New Home

Above Graphic: h/t Buzzflash.com

The Hill reports, Tens of thousands of voters drop Republican affiliation after Capitol riot:

More than 30,000 voters who had been registered members of the Republican Party have changed their voter registration in the weeks after a mob of pro-Trump supporters attacked the Capitol — an issue that led the House to impeach the former president for inciting the violence.

The massive wave of defections is a virtually unprecedented exodus that could spell trouble for a party that is trying to find its way after losing the presidential race and the Senate majority.

It could also represent the tip of a much larger iceberg: The 30,000 who have left the Republican Party reside in just a few states that report voter registration data, and information about voters switching between parties, on a weekly basis.

The Washington Post’s analyst Philip Bump downplays the significance of this number. Some Republicans are switching parties — but not many.

[R]umors that the Republican Party broadly is paying a price for the violence have a specific sort of appeal, a sense of justice aligning itself as expected. It leads to things such as this, from former U.S. senator from Arizona Jeff Flake (R) — recently censured by his party for failing to support Trump last year.

As of today, 9,944 Arizona Republicans have changed their party registration since the assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. Please, fellow Republicans, we cannot continue to excuse former President Trump's behavior and promote falsehoods about the election.

— Jeff Flake (@JeffFlake) January 27, 2021

The implication is obvious: Thousands of Republicans are fleeing the party, so it better straighten out. It had better change its behavior soon or risk collapse!

Eh, not really.

Data from the Arizona secretary of state provided to The Washington Post confirmed that about 9,300 Republicans left the party between Jan. 6 and Jan. 24. In politics, people rarely switch from one party to the other, just as they rarely flip from supporting one politician to supporting their opponent. Instead, people go through a middle ground of uncertainty before reaching a new pole — and so it is with most of those Arizona Republicans. Fewer than 1,000 became Democrats; most joined third parties or became independents.

Here are the changes, week by week as available.

It’s clear from the chart above that more Republicans than Democrats are switching their affiliations in the state. What isn’t clear is how that compares historically to changes in the state.

[W]hat we can say is that the trend in recent years has been away from parties and to political independence anyway. Data from the Pew Research Center show that, since 1994, the density of Democrats in the electorate has held fairly steady while the density of Republicans has dropped. The big decline for the GOP came not under Trump but in the second term of George W. Bush’s presidency.

[S]ince January 2005, for example, Democratic Party membership has been consistent while Republican Party membership has fallen. In other words, what’s happened in Arizona recently is in keeping with a broad trend.

That doesn’t mean that none of those switches are specific to what happened on Jan. 6, of course. People revisit their political preferences regularly for lots of reasons. It just means that there’s not strong evidence at this point that Arizonans are abandoning the Republican Party.

The Hill continues:

Voters switching parties is not unheard of, but the data show that in the first weeks of the year, far more Republicans have changed their voter registrations than Democrats. Many voters are changing their affiliation in key swing states that were at the heart of the battle for the White House and control of Congress.

Nearly 10,000 Pennsylvania voters dropped out of the Republican Party in the first 25 days of the year, according to the secretary of state’s office. About a third of them, 3,476, have registered as Democrats; the remaining two-thirds opted to register with another party or without any party affiliation.

By contrast, about a third as many Pennsylvania Democrats opted to either join the Republican Party (2,093 through Monday) or to register with no party or a minor party (1,184).

Almost 6,000 North Carolina voters have dropped their affiliation with the GOP. Nearly 5,000 Arizona voters are no longer registered Republicans. The number of defectors in Colorado stands north of 4,500 in the last few weeks. And 2,300 Maryland Republicans are now either unaffiliated or registered with the Democratic Party.

In all of those areas, the number of Democrats who left their party is a fraction of the number of Republican defectors.

* * *

So many voters switching parties absent a pending deadline has piqued the interest of elections experts. Most people tend to stick with the party with which they initially register, and those who do change are usually motivated by a looming primary election.

“Usually, absent a primary election that would induce people to switch parties so that they could participate in that primary, you don’t see much activity in party registration,” said Michael McDonald, a voting and elections expert at the University of Florida.

Only a small handful of states report voter registration data on a weekly basis. Others report monthly activity, and many states do not report granular details about those who leave one party or the other. Once more states report party registration data, the true number of Republicans who have re-registered in recent weeks may prove to be much higher.

McDonald said those who would take the proactive step to change their registration are likely to be well-informed voters who both follow the news and are aware of the process by which they would change their actual registration.

“These people who are doing this activity, they are likely very sophisticated voters. They’re highly participatory, most likely,” he said. “If you’re sophisticated enough to change your party registration, you’re somebody who’s likely to vote.”

Some of the data suggests the Republican exodus is happening in the suburban counties where GOP candidates and former President Trump struggled so much in both the 2018 and 2020 elections.

About a third of the Pennsylvania voters who dropped their affiliation with the Republican Party are registered to vote in Montgomery, Bucks, Chester and Delaware counties, the so-called Collar Counties outside of Philadelphia that once decided the balance of power in the Keystone State. Those counties have trended increasingly Democratic in recent years; President Biden won 58 percent of the vote in Chester County, the best performance ever recorded by a Democratic candidate there.

By contrast, Republicans picked up more former Democratic voters in places like Berks, Luzerne and Cambria counties, exurban and rural areas where Trump did better than previous Republican nominees.

Trump scored 68 percent of the vote in Cambria County, home of Johnstown and ancestral Democrats once represented in Congress by Rep. John Murtha (D). That tally was better than any previous Republican nominee, besting even the 66.5 percent Trump won there in 2016.

McDonald cautioned that the number of voters switching parties overall was relatively small — the 10,000 Republicans who fled in Pennsylvania represents a tiny fraction of the party’s almost 3.5 million registered voters in the state, for example. But the figures represent a reversal of registration trends that were taking place before Election Day.

“Prior to the election, the trend was in the opposite direction, there were more Republicans that were registering,” McDonald said. “It’s not just like it’s a little blip, it’s also a blip in a different direction than we’ve seen in previous years.”

There has been a lot of crazy talk lately about Donald Trump starting a new political party, and that he is using this threat as leverage against Republican Senators in his second impeachment trial to gain an acquittal.

Oh, please.

First of all, Donald Trump is too stupid and too lazy to be able to do the immense amount of work required to form a viable governing political party. No one has really succeeded at creating a new governing political party since the Republican Party replaced the Whigs and Know Nothing Party in 1856. (Sorry fringe political parties, you are not serious contenders, just potential spoilers in close contests).

Secondly, what the hell does Donald Trump need with a new political party? His hostile takeover of the Republican Party is complete; he owns it lock, stock and barrel. The Party of Lincoln is as dead and gone as its founder, it has been subsumed by a fascist personality cult of Donald Trump. Republican senators are his loyal sycophants, that’s why they will not vote to convict this traitor to his country. They are complicit enablers to his crime.

As I have said many times over the years, this is not your father’s GOP. The dead carcass of the Republican Party has been hollowed-out by the parasitic radical extremist fringe elements of the far-right. These are the “double high authoritarians” that John Dean warned about in his 2006 book, Conservatives Without Conscience. See also his sequel, Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers (2020).

No, the people who need to be forming an alternative viable governing political party are the so-called “Never Trumpers” who have been content to take pot shots from the sidelines and to encourage Democrats to take all the risk and to do all the heavy lifting to oppose Trumpism, the new American fascism, since 2015. Oh sure, it’s one thing to write critical op-ed pieces and to produce high quality negative political ads, but it’s entirely something else to do the immense amount of work required to form a viable governing political party, which they have refused or failed to do. They are already more than four years too late.

If “Never Trumpers” really want traditional Republicans who cannot stomach the white nationalists, Christian nationalists, Trump/QAnon personality cult members, and who were shocked and appalled by a seditious violent insurrection in their name to overthrow the legitimate Government of the United States and to end the “American experiment” with democracy and to replace it with an authoritarian fascist dictatorship under Donald Trump to have an alternative political party to which to defect, they should have started long ago in creating a viable governing political party. Better late than never, I say.

These “Never Trumpers” are the intellectual brain trust of the traditional Republican Party. They know what it takes to build a political party and have the experience doing the immense hard work required in running a viable governing political party. They are responsible for past GOP successes (and failures). If they really want the current Party of Trump to go the way of the Whigs, they have to give traditional Republican voters an alternative viable governing political party to which to turn.

This means building a political party infrastructure and running candidates not just for president, but for state and local offices up and down the ballot. This requires voter registration drives to get enough voters registered with the new political party in order to qualify candidates to appear on the ballot. It requires building this party infrastructure in all 50 states. And it requires raising a ton of money.

So it’s time to stop shirking your duty to God and country “Never Trumpers,” and to get busy building that alternative viable governing political party to the Party of Trump. Traditional Republicns are seeking a new home.