Rollins’ political action group emerged from Trump’s 2016 operation but made no commitment to support him in any future race. With the aim of uniting the party before halfway through 2022, Rollins said Trump would be wise to focus on allaying the concerns of moderate Republicans. But he added that this probably wasn’t the place for it.
“If he is to be and continue to be the leader of this party, he has to make peace with Republicans of all kinds,” Rollins said. “I think he’s going to step in front of this crowd, and no matter how carefully the scripts put him there, he’s basically going to do his own thing – as he has done many times in the past.”
There are some noticeable absences on the list of invited CPACs that reflect the current divide in the party. Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the chamber who was open about his desire to leave Trump in the dust, was not invited. Mike Pence, whose tenure as vice president came to a violent end when he refused to support Trump’s eleventh hour takeover, leading Trump’s supporters to threaten Pence’s life when they stormed the Capitol, declined an invitation to speak. And Nikki Haley, once a rising force in the party, won’t be there either – after giving a withering interview to Politico in which she blew up Trump saying he had no future in GOP politics.
A poll published on Sunday by Suffolk University and USA Today found that three out of five voters who backed Trump last year said they would love to see him again next time. Only 29 percent said they shouldn’t try again.
If the socially moderate, business-oriented wing of the party and its increasingly labor-oriented base are to break up, the numbers so far speak for the base. According to the Suffolk / USA Today poll, voters who supported Trump last year said, 20 points ahead of them, that they showed more loyalty to him than the Republican Party.
46 percent said they would follow Trump to a new party if he broke away from the GOP. 27 percent said they hadn’t made up their minds yet.
(The poll sample included all respondents who said they would vote for Trump in a Suffolk poll sometime in 2020 and agreed to be called back after the election. Ninety percent of respondents said they did had actually cast a ballot for him in November.)
