We have increasingly begun to see that the Republican Party is seeing two distinct factions forming within it: the more moderate, traditional type conservative faction and the pro-Trump, far-right faction. Especially after the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, the two sides haven’t been getting along quite well lately, with people on both sides mulling over starting their own party.
It is evident that many traditional-type Republicans, like those who voted to convict Trump in his recent impeachment trial, a group which includes (among others) Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Mitt Romney of Utah, as well as representatives like Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, are dissatisfied with Trump. They have been outspoken in terms of their criticism of Trump.
Evan McMullin, a conservative who ran as an independent against former President Donald Trump in 2016 and won a substantial share of the vote in Utah and a former policy director of the House Republican Conference, has floated the idea recently of starting a breakout party along with people who worked for former Republican administrations back to the Ronald Reagan administration driven by center-right politics. This new party would only run candidates in certain races but would endorse candidates nationally. If such a party is formed, we can likely expect some of these aforementioned Republicans to jump on board. In fact, Murkowski has even floated leaving the GOP if it gets too pro-Trump, so she would likely join this new party.
For Murkowski, considering her history of running as a moderate, she is likely to retain overwhelming support from Alaskans even if she leaves the GOP. Since Alaska passed ranked-choice voting last November, meaning that state elections have jungle primaries where the top four advance to the general election on Election Day in November, she is likely to be challenged from the right anyway, so there is absolutely nothing to lose if she does this. Furthermore, she even won as a write-in candidate (yes, winning as a write-in candidate) when she lost the Republican primary back in 2010 with 39.5 percent of the total vote, so there is no indication that she would lose if she left the GOP. In addition, if the Democrats chose not to run anyone against her, she would cruise to victory.
The idea of the Trump wing breaking off from the GOP has also been thrown around. In fact, Donald Trump has floated the idea of creating a “Patriot Party” multiple times in the recent past to try and threaten the GOP into conforming to his ideology and positions. This might have been one of the key reasons why so few Republican senators were willing to break with the former president and vote to convict him. Polls have indicated well over 60 percent of Republican voters would leave the current GOP and join the Trump-led “Patriot Party.” This would mean that a center-right third party would garner approximately 40 percent or less of the vote.
In any case, no matter which side breaks off from the current Republican Party, such a split would be absolutely devastating to what remains of the GOP, if any. The two new conservative parties, one which we will dub as the “Center-right Party” and the other as the “Patriot Party,” would get roughly half of the current GOP vote, massively splitting the right-wing vote. Considering America’s first-past-the-post plurality voting system (see this amazing CGP Grey video for a great explanation), such a split would likely massively “spoil” the right-wing vote and lead to Democratic victories nationally.
As a quick reference point, let’s time travel back to the 1992 election, when a major third-party candidate ran nationwide: Ross Perot. Perot, a fiscal conservative but moderately liberal socially, ran as an independent against the then-President George H. W. Bush and Democratic challenger and later President Bill Clinton. As we all know, Clinton won the 1992 election, but Perot had one of the best showings for a third party or independent in a nationwide election, capturing 19 million popular votes, or just under 19 percent, compared to Clinton’s 43 percent and Bush’s 38 percent.
In this election, despite what may seem to be a resounding victory for Clinton, was not actually that big of a victory when margins are taken into account. Due to Perot being on the ballot, a great number of states had substantially narrower margins. Georgia, for example, was only won by Clinton by 0.6 percent. Had Perot not been on the ballot (he won 13 percent of the vote here), Bush would absolutely have won the state. Perot also took substantial votes away from both Bush and Clinton from states like California, Texas, New Jersey, and more. If Perot was not known well nationally, Bush might have been able to win a second term.
That brings us back to the present day. Assuming Trump runs as an independent or under a third party in 2024, we could see many states, even traditionally Republican states, flip blue. (For this simulation, we will stick with 2020 electoral vote counts. The electoral map will look different after the Census Bureau announces its results from the 2020 Census.)
Let’s take, for example, the state of Texas. This state went to Donald Trump by 5.6 percent, with him winning 52 percent of the vote to Biden’s 46 percent. Considering no Democrats are likely to vote for Trump should he run again, all of Trump’s votes in this hypothetical 2024 election would come from the current GOP vote, which accounts for 52 percent of the vote. Assuming 64 percent of Republican voters back Trump, that means about 36 percent of Republicans will back a hypothetical “center-right” candidate. This translates to 33 percent of total voters backing Trump and Patriot Party and about 19 percent backing the “center-right” GOP. That would mean that the Democratic candidate would win resoundingly here, by a margin of 13 percent, even if his or her total vote share remained unchanged from 2020.
One of the most solid Republican states in the country is Wyoming, where Trump won just under 70 percent of the vote there compared to Biden’s 27 percent. Assuming the same split in the GOP, Trump’s Patriot Party would get 45 percent of the total vote. This would narrow down the Republicans’ 43-point victory here down to just an 18-point victory margin.
If we just made a quick estimate, we would see every state that went to Biden in 2020 solidify substantially if Trump split 64 percent of the Republican vote away, and many other states narrow down substantially.
We won’t make the full calculations here, and there are a great number of factors which could affect this, such as how popular Trump is in every state (Utah, for example, would be much less friendly to Trump than say, Arkansas), but the general gist is that Democrats would win resounding victories all across the country.
States like Alaska, Montana, and South Carolina could even be extremely competitive for the Democrats if this happened.
The point is, if the GOP split into two, it would be absolutely great news for the Democratic Party. If the Democrats succeed in getting either faction to break off from the GOP, they could remain in power for years, if not decades, to come.