Republican Voters Want The GOP's Future To Look Trumpian

Roughly three-quarters of GOP voters say they want the party to continue to follow former president Donald Trump’s leadership, a new HuffPost/YouGov survey finds.

Asked to choose between two options for their party’s future, a 74% majority of Republican and Republican leaning-independent voters say Republican officials should follow Trump going forward, compared to 26% who want to see them go in a different direction.

GOP voters no longer see Trump as the unambiguous head of the party, the poll finds. Instead, they’re split, with 41% saying Trump is currently the leader of the Republican Party, 43% saying he isn’t any longer, and the remainder unsure.

Most, however, still believe he has significant party support. A 64% majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters say that they think most congressional Republicans still generally support Trump, although just 18% now think that almost all of them do. (Those numbers are basically unchanged from December.) 

Those perceptions largely comport with political reality. Only 10 House Republicans voted in favor of impeaching Trump .

“Right now, the GOP looks much more like Trump’s party than that of any moderate or establishment GOP alternative,” political scientist Julia Azari wrote in a recent FiveThirtyEight article . “It may be up to other politicians — not Trump — to determine exactly what that means.”

Rank-and-file Republicans remain likelier to express allegiance to the former president than to the party as a whole. A 40% plurality of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters say they consider themselves mostly supporters of Trump, compared to 26% who say they’re mostly supporters of the GOP and 23% who say they’re equally supporters of both. By a 36-point margin, they say they’d likely side with Trump over their district’s representative in Congress if the two were in disagreement.

President Joe Biden, despite currently occupying the White House, plays a less outsized role in Democrats’ loyalties. Just 14% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters say they consider themselves mostly supporters of Biden, with 30% saying they mostly support the Democratic Party, and 46% that they equally support both.

Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters currently see little daylight between Biden and his legislative counterparts 85% say they believe Biden has the support of at least a majority of congressional Democrats, and 58% think that support is nearly unanimous. They also say by a 29-point margin that they’d likely side with Biden if he were to disagree with the representative for their district.