HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) – In the 36 hours after last week’s deadly uprising at the Capitol, 112 Republicans contacted the election office in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, to change their party registration. Ethan Demme was one of them.
“Ever since they started denying the election results, I kind of knew it was going this way,” said Demme, the former chairman of the province’s Republican Party, who opposes President Donald Trump and is now independent. “If they continued, I knew I couldn’t continue. But if you’ve been a Republican all your life, it’s hard to jump from a big boat into a small boat. “
Officials are seeing similar scenes taking place elsewhere.
In Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, 192 people have changed their party registrations since the January 6 riot. Only 13 switched to the GOP – the other 179 turned Democrats, independently or a third party, according to Bethany Salzarulo, the director of the election bureau.
In Linn County, Iowa, the home of Cedar Rapids, more than four dozen voters dropped ties to the Republican Party in the 48 hours following the attack on the Capitol. They usually switched to no party, said election commissioner Joel Miller, although a small number took the highly unusual step of canceling their registrations altogether.
The party switching pales in comparison to the more than 74 million people who voted for President Donald Trump in November. And it is unclear whether they are united in their motivations. Some may reject politics altogether, while others may leave a Republican party that they fear will be less loyal to Trump.
But they offer an early sign of the volatility ahead of the GOP as the party braces for the political ramifications of the riots that Trump sparked.
“I do think there is a marked shift from a quick defense of the president to ‘wow, that was a bridge too far,’ said Kirk Adams, the former Republican Speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives.
Adams said he knew several people, including once solid Trump supporters, who are changing their registrations. He said it could take weeks or months for the full impact of the uprising to be apparent.
“Minds are being changed,” he said. “But you can’t go from one day to the next from ‘I think the president is right and the elections are being stolen’ to ‘I think he was wrong about everything’.”
Party registration doesn’t always provide an example of how voters will cast their votes, especially when the next major national election is nearly two years away. But party leaders across the country are concerned that the riots could have a lasting impact.
The GOP cannot afford to slip its ranks following an election that, even with the record-breaking Republican turnout, has lost control of both the presidency and the United States Senate.
“I’ve looked at my party in this state more and more and our numbers are declining,” said Gary Eichelberger, a commissioner in the suburbs of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. “If we reduce the base of the party, we will lose this province.”
Republicans in Washington are approaching the moment with caution, denouncing the rebellion, and barely offering Trump any defense. But so far, few have joined the democratic calls for the president’s impeachment and immediate removal.
Only two Senate Republicans, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Patrick Toomey of Pennsylvania, have called for Trump to step down.
Multiple GOP officials said there was some unease about the direction of the party at the RNC winter rally on Amelia Island, Florida, which took place a few days after the attack. According to Henry Barbour, an RNC member from Mississippi, serious talks are underway with the committee to take an in-depth look at the 2020 election results to determine what the party did wrong and how to better engage voters.
But Trump still has an appeal for parts of the GOP base.
A Quinnipiac poll released Monday found that about three-quarters of Republicans believe Trump’s false statements that there was widespread voter fraud in the November election, prompting the attack on the Capitol after Trump had a crowd of supporters urged to go to Congress as it was. set to certify the victory of President-elect Joe Biden.
In total, 7 in 10 Republicans approved of Trump’s performance as president, compared to 89% in Quinnipiac’s December poll.
“If you love President Trump, you love President Trump,” said Michele Fiore, a Nevada RNC committee woman. “We support him with all our heart. We know he didn’t cause the chaos that happened in Washington, DC on January 6. “
Rae Chornenky, who stepped down as chair of the Maricopa County Republican Party in Arizona shortly after the election amid a power struggle with those in the state party who claimed widespread electoral fraud, said she thinks the president is still a knockout. of the lot.
“They just believe it was a stolen election, and they are not going to back down that position,” Chornenky said. “He will be the driving force” of the GOP for years to come, Chornenky predicted of Trump.
The 2022 midterm elections could be a test of that. Former Rep. Ryan Costello is strongly considering running as a Republican to open Pennsylvania Senate seat. He is a longtime Trump critic and sees the time as ripe for an explicitly anti-Trump GOP candidate.
“We need people who want to lose races and lose political campaigns,” Costello said. “We need campaigns about the purification of the party. Sometimes it is not possible to dance around landmines. Sometimes you just have to jump in. ”
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Beaumont reported from Des Moines, Iowa, and Riccardi from Denver. Associated Press Writers Summer Ballentine in Columbia, Missouri; Scott Bauer in Madison, Wisconsin; Hannah Fingerhut in Washington; Ryan J. Foley in Iowa City, Iowa; Steve Peoples in New York; and Julie Carr Smyth in Columbus, Ohio contributed to this report.