“On the Holmes Front,” with Frank Holmes
The Republican Party establishment has been waiting for this moment for four years.
Donald Trump is out of office, impeached for the “second” time, and denounced by some would-be leaders of his own party.
After four years of dragging their heels, holding their noses, and backing America First policies they actually hate, the Republican establishment thinks the GOP is now Trump-free.
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They have got a rude awakening coming.
Almost two-thirds of Republicans would bolt their party to join a new party founded by Donald Trump, a new poll shows.
A Hill/HarrisX survey found that 64 percent of Republicans would follow Trump out of the GOP and into a third party if he starts one… and half of those voters said they were “very likely” to join the new party.
Only 36 percent of Republicans said they’re likely to stick with the non-Trump Republican Party.
“If Trump were to split from the GOP and create his own party, polling suggests he might well create the second largest political party in the country, knocking the GOP down to third place,” said Dritan Nesho, CEO and chief pollster at HarrisX.
Not only would Republicans join this coalition, but 28 percent of Independents and a surprisingly high 15 percent of Democrats said they would vote for a new, Trump-led third party.
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The poll is just the latest to show the American people don’t want to go back to the lifeless GOP of the Bush-Romney era.
An NBC poll conducted just two weeks earlier—after the Capitol riot—found that both parties would split in half between the Beltway insider crowd and the grassroots.
Exactly half of Republican voters say they are “Trump Republicans,” with another half saying they back the old GOP. And half of Democrats say they identify with Joe Biden, while half say they want a party led by Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.
Oh, and 99 percent of Republicans say they have “positive feelings toward Trump.”
That tracks with a Morning Consult/Politico poll that found 81 percent of Republicans approve of Donald Trump—and 50 percent of Republicans say Trump should play a “major role” in the future of the Republican Party.
“Trump remains a political force to be reckoned with,” said Nesho.
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There’s so much unrest that even the pollsters are trying to give corrupt leaders in both parties tips on how to keep their hold on power.
Trump’s cross-party appeal gives him “a diverse base of support,” Nesho said, because they back him on “a number of issues that are yet to be properly addressed by, and coopted by, Democratic and Republican elites.”
“Coopted” by “elites”? Does that sound like democracy? That sounds like the primrose path that brought us to 2016—and the verge of splitting the GOP in half.
Trump brought forgotten voters of all backgrounds to the polls during his 2016 and 2020 campaigns, including abandoned working-class Republicans and “Reagan Democrats” living in small towns in the Upper Midwest. The Republican presidential ticket hasn’t won those places since the landslides of the Reagan era.
At times, Trump’s supporters have talked about forming a new, America First political party—usually calling it The Patriot Party, with a lion as its mascot.
Publicly, Trump’s advisers have talked the idea down. Trump 2020 campaign adviser Jason Miller said the former president “has made clear his goal is to win back the House and Senate for Republicans in 2022.”
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And make no mistake: The two parties have made it difficult to get a challenger off the ground.
The major parties have passed laws “to protect their privileged position by making it harder for other parties to contest elections. For example, many states have onerous ballot access laws that require large numbers of signatures or stringent filing fees,” according to the FiveThirtyEight blog. As a result of these challenges, it’s more difficult for minor parties to even be up for consideration in November, much less win.”
But if anybody could overcome those problems, it’s Donald Trump.
He already teased a third party run in 1999 with Ross Perot’s old Reform Party. And he registered with the New York state affiliate, the Independence Party, before becoming a Republican.
And he’s set the stage for a major showdown with the GOP that could determine their future.
Trump is backing primary challenges against the entrenched Republican incumbents who supported his impeachment or stopped him from passing his legislative agenda during his four years in office.
And if those primaries don’t work, will he start a new party then?
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He’d have two years to ramp it up.
He’d have the money to fund a 50-state campaign.
And the polls show, he’d have the voters—mostly Republican voters.
GOP Establishment, watch out.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”