More than 30,000 voters who had been registered members of the Republican Party have changed their voter registration in the weeks after a mob of pro-Trump supporters attacked the Capitol.
The massive wave of defections is a virtually unprecedented exodus that could spell trouble for a party that is trying to find its way after losing the presidential race and the Senate majority, The Hill reported.
It could also represent the tip of a much larger iceberg: The 30,000 who have left the Republican Party reside in just a few states that report voter registration data, and information about voters switching between parties, on a weekly basis.
Nearly 10,000 Pennsylvania voters dropped out of the Republican Party in the first 25 days of the year, according to the secretary of state’s office. About a third of them, 3,476, have registered as Democrats; the remaining two-thirds opted to register with another party or without any party affiliation.
By contrast, about a third as many Pennsylvania Democrats opted to either join the Republican Party (2,093 through Monday) or to register with no party or a minor party (1,184).
Almost 6,000 North Carolina voters have dropped their affiliation with the GOP. Nearly 5,000 Arizona voters are no longer registered Republicans. The number of defectors in Colorado stands north of 4,500 in the last few weeks. And 2,300 Maryland Republicans are now either unaffiliated or registered with the Democratic Party.
In all of those areas, the number of Democrats who left their party is a fraction of the number of Republican defectors.
So many voters switching parties absent a pending deadline has piqued the interest of elections experts. Most people tend to stick with the party with which they initially register, and those who do change are usually motivated by a looming primary election.
Some of the data suggests the Republican exodus is happening in the suburban counties where GOP candidates and former President Trump struggled so much in both the 2018 and 2020 elections.
