It wasn’t just the Jan. 6 Capitol riot that led Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R.-Ill.) to start a political action committee aimed at challenging Donald Trump’s hold on the Republican Party. It’s the way most GOP elected officials seem to have moved on.
“The main impetus was obviously Jan 6th,” Kinzinger told me in an interview. “But I think even beyond that, it was seeing that there wasn’t going to be a mass wake-up, there wasn’t going to be a mass eye-opening to what we’ve become. And in fact, even in this recent week, you see the trend kind of back to Trumpism.”
Kinzinger, like Liz Cheney and Ben Sasse, is an ambitious pol who is making the bet that Trump lunacy is going to flame out. I’m not sure that’s a good bet. The more likely optimistic outlook is that the Republicans will slowly lose their ability to gain majorities or win the White House as people leave the party of crazy. The pessimistic outlook is that they actually continue to wield power through the minority for some time, getting increasingly authoritarian and violent.
There are many stories from around the country about voters changing their affiliation.
Some Republicans across the country are changing their party registrations following the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
“It’s definitely a trend and we noticed it right after — on the 8th or 9th — right after the insurrection on the 6th,” Consuelo Kelly, the Broward County Supervisor of Elections communications director, told ABC News on Saturday about the changes in Florida.
The numbers are minuscule in the grand scheme of things — a few thousand voters here or there doesn’t make much of a dent in the Republican Party’s voter base nationwide. And some Democrats have also changed their party affiliations too, although at a lower rate. But the early numbers are raising eyebrows.
Dr. Michael McDonald, a political science professor at the University of Florida who studies voting and elections, told ABC News that this kind of change right after a federal election is out of the ordinary.
“It’s very unusual for people to change or switch their party registrations without some incentive to do so,” he said.
“The typical reason why people change their registration is there’s a primary approaching and that primary is in a party-registration state, where you have to be registered with a party or as an independent. So, before an election you’ll see people re-registering in order to participate in the primary in the states that have party registration,” McDonald added. “It’s not a typical activity for people to call up and say, ‘I want to be registered as a Democrat, Republican, independent or nonpartisan.’ That’s a very unusual thing to be happening and reports that we’re getting from election officers — it seems like it’s a thing.”
Maybe that won’t make any difference in the long run. A lot of these people may not have voted for Trump anyway and just decided they’s had enough of the GOP after his protracted temper tantrum after the election and the January 6th. But I would guess that moves like stripping Liz Cheney of her post and elevating Marjorie Taylor Green, along with a circus-like defense in the impeachment trial could move some more.
But again, even the best case, in my opinion, makes that a slow erosion of support rather than sudden collapse. The polls show that three quarters of Republicans are still Trump cultists in good standing. Apparently, nothing they’ve seen has made them change their minds about him or the party.
Update:
Here’s another story about Republicans leaving the party. This is a group of Bush administration officials. A few dozen here, a few hundred there and pretty soon you’re talking about a real exodus. We’ll see.