David Jolly, who was the representative from Florida's 13th district as a Republican from 2014 to 2017 and publicly left the GOP in 2018, has been very vocal on cable news as a critic of former President Trump and his allies in Congress. He’s not alone. From Axios:
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Election supervisors say 2,025 Republicans switched parties in the eight days after Jan. 6 — mostly dropping their party affiliation— compared to just 306 Democrats, even though Ds outnumber Rs in those counties.
- The number switching is far higher than in the same period following the 2016 presidential election. Since the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, an unusual number of Republicans in the three biggest Tampa Bay-area counties have switched parties, the Tampa Bay Times reports.
Jolly has also been using his influence to attract Republicans who have left the GOP to a new party he's chairing — the Serve America Movement, or SAM. SAM, born in 2017, hopes to bring in defected Democrats and independents. This could be a problem for the Democratic Party, but his hope seems to be that it will be more of a problem for the GOP.
The question is are there enough anti-Trump Republicans to start a new party, or will they stay put and hope the radical republicans come back from crazy? Jolly says that the GOP is now "a party of Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan and the QAnon woman from Georgia. The greater that disruption, the greater the chance for a third party to emerge."
He was on TV recently, mentioning how Trump's bluster about creating a third party (please!) was just bluster, because The Donald has no clue what’s involved, whereas Jolly is knowledgeable and is very serious about the process of establishing a new party.
Jolly may succeed, but my take on it is that if the crazies and non-crazies cannot find common ground, expect more people to change to ‘independent.'