Almost 19,000 Pennsylvania voters have left the Republican Party since the Capitol attack

When Diane Tyson got her driver’s license renewed Jan. 5, a DMV clerk asked whether she wanted to make any changes to her voter registration. A lifelong Republican, Tyson once ran for local office near Reading. She decided to wait: Supporters of Donald Trump were set to descend on Washington the next day as Congress met to certify his election loss.

“I wanted to see if it would be as ugly as it turned out to be,” she said.

As upsetting as the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol attack was, Tyson, 68, said watching Pennsylvania congressmen vote to throw out their own state’s election results is what soured her on the GOP.

She changed her registration to independent on Jan. 7.

“I knew I could not be a Republican anymore,” she said. “I just can’t — it’s not who I am. The Republican Party has gone down a deep hole that I want no part of. I don’t want an ‘R’ after my name.”

About 19,000 Pennsylvanians have left the Republican Party since Jan 6. That’s a drop in the bucket for a state with more than 8.8 million registered voters, and almost 3.5 million Republicans. But it’s also an unusually high rate of defections: Almost two-thirds of the voters who have switched parties this year left the GOP, compared with a third or less typically.

And there are signs of a broader political shift underway. These are often longtime party loyalists, highly engaged voters who cast Republican primary ballots in low-profile, off-year elections, according to an Inquirer analysis of voter registration data. They haven’t changed their political ideologies, they said in interviews. But they’re registering as third-party or independent voters because they believe that their political home, now led by Trump, has changed around them.

That raises the prospect of a Republican primary electorate even friendlier to Trump and Trump-allied candidates — something that could have big implications for the party in competitive races for governor and U.S. Senate next year.


Link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/almost-19000-pennsylvania-voters-have-left-the-republican-party-since-the-capitol-attack/ar-BB1dTQ0U