The GOP Is Very Much Trump’s Party, Poll Shows

More Trump voters said they were loyal to President Donald Trump than they were to the Republican Party, according to a new HuffPost/YouGov poll. 

Some 49% of Republican and Republican-leaning independents who voted for Trump in 2016 said they consider themselves more supporters of Trump than of the Republican Party. Just 19% said they were more supporters of the party, with another 28% saying they were supporters of both.

The poll came on the heels of the Republican National Convention, at which the party opted not to adopt a new platform and chose instead to “reassert the party’s strong support for President Donald Trump and his administration.”

About 61% of Republican and Republican-leaning independent voters said that they would be more likely to support Trump over congressional Republicans if they had a disagreement; only 13% said they would side with the party members.

Similarly, 66% said they would back Trump over their own representative; just 10% would support the representative.

These questions are, of course, broad hypotheticals ― public opinion could shake out very differently in the event of a new schism between the president and his party’s congressional delegation. The results suggest, however, that most Republicans’ sympathies lie with Trump.

Most of Trump’s supporters see little distance between him and other officials in the party, the poll found.

Roughly three-quarters of Trump voters said they believed that most of or almost all congressional Republicans support Trump. That represented a marked strengthening of Trump’s political situation compared to three years ago.

In August 2017, following the Senate GOP’s failure to repeal Obamacare, only 47% of Trump voters believed that the president had the support of most of his party.

Trump voters’ support for Trump has remained relatively consistent over that time.

The HuffPost/YouGov poll consisted of 1,000 completed interviews conducted from Aug. 24 to 26 among U.S. adults, using a sample selected from YouGov’s opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population.

HuffPost teamed up with YouGov to conduct daily opinion polls. You can learn more about this project and take part in YouGov’s nationally representative opinion polling. More details on the polls’ methodology are available here.

Most surveys report a margin of error that represents some but not all potential survey errors. YouGov’s reports include a model-based margin of error, which rests on a specific set of statistical assumptions about the selected sample rather than the standard methodology for random probability sampling. If these assumptions are wrong, the model-based margin of error may also be inaccurate.