On CNN’s Sunday morning “Inside Politics Sunday with Manu Raju,” Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski again is on tape stating she “absolutely” won’t vote for Donald Trump for president and she would not say whether she plans to leave the Republican Party.
Murkowski was one of seven Senate Republicans who voted to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial, a vote that was taken after he was no longer president and was once again a private citizen.
“I wish that as Republicans, we had … a nominee that I could get behind,” Murkowski told Raju, as they walked through the halls of the Hart Senate Building. “I certainly can’t get behind Donald Trump.”
The party’s shift toward Trump has Murkowski rethinking her future within the Republican Party, and even when pressed, she would not say if she will remain a Republican.
“Oh, I think I’m very independent minded. I just regret that our party is seemingly becoming a party of Donald Trump.”
Asked if she might become an independent, Murkowski replied, “I am navigating my way through some very interesting political times. Let’s just leave it at that.”
Murkowski was elected through ranked-choice voting and open primaries brought to Alaska by Murkowski’s surrogates at Alaskans for Better Elections. Without having to face a Republican primary in 2022, she was able to beat Republican-endorsed Kelly Tshibaka in the general election, because Democrats crossed over to block the Republicans’ preference and mark Murkowski in either their first-choice or second-choice slot on the ranked-choice ballot.
Last year, she told reporters the party was too extreme for her.
“We should be concerned about this as Republicans. I’m having more ‘rational Republicans’ coming up to me and saying, ‘I just don’t know how long I can stay in this party,’” Murkowski said. “Now our party is becoming known as a group of kind of extremist, populist over-the-top [people] where no one is taking us seriously anymore.”
She was addressing the opportunity that Republicans have for taking back the White House. And she hinted last year that she was disenchanted with her political home.
“You have people who felt some allegiance to the party that are now really questioning, ‘Why am I [in the party?]” Murkowski told The Hill reporter Alexander Bolton. “I think it’s going to get even more interesting as we move closer to the elections and we start going through some of these primary debates.
“Is it going to be a situation of who can be more outlandish than the other?” she asked, rhetorically. If she had anything nice to say about Republicans, the reporter did not take notice.
The latest Data for Progress poll of Alaskans shows that Trump will win the state with 53% of the vote.
