Here are the main sticking points.
There’s a growing divide within the Republican Party — and we don’t just mean among lawmakers themselves. A new poll shows some surprising discrepancies when it comes between GOP voters and the officials they elect into Congress.
In partnership with the U.S. Association of Former Members of Congress, researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst surveyed nearly 300 former lawmakers and found that those on the Republican side don’t align with registered GOP voters on several key issues. This includes everything from the legitimacy of President Biden’s win in the 2020 election to Donald Trump’s threat to democracy, and attitudes towards the Jan. 6, 2020 attack on the Capitol.
The survey caught the eye of former Meet the Press host Chuck Todd, who expressed alarm about how differently former Republican reps view democracy than rank-and-file GOP voters right now. “This survey of former members of Congress only served to raise my concerns that their need to stay in office and stay in power would make a second Trump presidency anything but small-‘d’ democratic,” he wrote.
We took a closer look at some of these differing viewpoints that Todd warns about and what sets this survey apart from others.
How ex-GOP lawmakers and GOP voters differ
President Biden’s 2020 election victory
You’d think by now we wouldn’t still be talking about whether Biden won the 2020 election, but that’s not the case. In the UMass poll, researchers asked, “Do you believe that the election of President Biden was legitimate?” In response, a whopping 82 percent of former GOP lawmakers said he won fair and square — which marks a stark contrast to GOP voters’ 26 percent.
The Jan. 6 insurrection
Another major point of contention centers on the attack on the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters. Among former GOP members of Congress, 53 percent described it as “an insurrection,” while 54 percent called it a protest, with some even thinking it was both. As for GOP voters, 74 percent believe the attack was just a protest and nothing more. (Only 14 percent of GOP voters went so far as to call it an “insurrection.”)
There was also some disagreement on the extent to which those who took part in the Jan. 6 attack should be pursued, prosecuted, and punished. While ex-GOP lawmakers were overwhelmingly supportive of these efforts at 72 percent, fewer than a third (29 percent) of Republican voters agreed. Ultimately, more than 1,100 people, including former President Trump, were charged in connection with the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
Donald Trump’s impact on American democracy
Researchers found that 64 percent of former GOP lawmakers believe Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him threaten our nation’s democracy. By comparison, just 18 percent of Republican voters feel the same way.
“As has been said numerous times, authoritarians usually don’t take power, they are handed it, and the elected GOP class has gotten more comfortable handing power to Trump with every year that has gone by since he burst onto the scene in 2016,” Todd said about these findings.
What makes the UMass survey unique
Led by associate professor of political science and co-director of UMass Poll, Alex Theodoridis, the researchers focused on surveying former living members of Congress and compared their responses with how the general public has answered some of the same survey questions over the last year.
According to their methodology, 293 former members responded to the online survey, and 237 of them completed the survey, out of more than 500 former members of Congress asked to participate through the U.S. Association of Former Members of Congress.
It’s worth noting that 83 percent of the respondents were male and over 90 percent were white. By comparison, just 17 percent of those who took part in the survey were women, while Black and Latino former members each represented 3 percent of responses. As Todd points out, there haven’t been many people of color in Congress until relatively recently, though that’s starting to change dramatically. For instance, the current 118th Congress is the most racially and ethnically diverse to date, with 133 lawmakers identifying as Black, Hispanic, Asian American, American Indian, Alaska Native, or multiracial.
