Most Republicans Want the GOP to Stick with Trump
Despite extremely vocal backlash after a 2005 video of Donald Trump making lewd remarks about women was released on Friday, a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll suggests that most Republican voters still want Trump to stay in the race.
Based on the poll, which was conducted immediately after The Washington Post first published the video clip on Friday, only 12 percent of Republican voters believe Trump should end his campaign, while 74 percent believe that the GOP should continue to back the candidate.
Those numbers have certainly come to life over the past couple days: When the Republican nominee left Trump Tower on Saturday, he was greeted by a mob of fans eager to express their unrelenting support for him in spite of the recent scandal. Even with multiple prominent Republican leaders denouncing him and calling for him to step down, Trump and his supporters remain unshaken.
In fact, many Republicans seem to be siding with Trump more than ever. At a Wisconsin rally on Saturday, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan was greeted to a chorus of boos because he’d uninvited Trump to the event, and because vice presidential candidate Mike Pence had declined to attend in his place. Although Ryan attempted to address the "elephant in the room" by reiterating that he stood by his official statement on the Trump video - in which he’d said he was "sickened" by it - by the end of his speech, people in the audience were heckling him off the stage.
All this is in spite of the fact that many Republicans were actually just as horrified by the unearthed video. According to the POLITICO/Morning Consult poll, 48 percent of Republican voters said the video "made them feel less favorably toward Trump," and 74 percent of all voters reported that they had a negative reaction to the video. But for a surprising number of people, the data also suggests that the video simply didn’t change their opinion at all - or at least, not enough for them to want to give Trump the axe just yet.
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