Murkowski signals openness to leaving Republican Party (again)

When Sen. Lisa Murkowski formally endorsed Nikki Haley’s presidential campaign earlier this month, the announcement came too late to have a significant impact. After all, Donald Trump had already effectively locked up the Republican Party’s presidential nomination.

But the Alaskan didn’t just make headlines by siding with the former president’s intraparty rival; Murkowski also announced at the time that she wouldn’t support Trump in the general election, becoming the second incumbent GOP senator to make such a declaration.

Three weeks later, as NBC News reported, the Republican lawmaker went a little further.

In an interview that aired on CNN, the senator was also asked whether she would be open to being an independent who caucuses with Republicans. “I am navigating my way through some very interesting political times,” Murkowski replied. “Let’s just leave it at that.”

In the same interview, she again made clear that she wouldn’t vote for Trump in the fall, though it was the senator’s comments about her tenuous ties to her party that raised eyebrows.

It’s difficult to predict with confidence exactly what Murkowski might do next, but it’s worth emphasizing for context that she’s been eyeing the GOP’s exit door for a while.

As regular readers know, it was just last year when the Alaskan 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.” The senator added, “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.’”

The senator — who faced right-wing challengers in two recent re-election campaigns, and had to run a write-in campaign in 2010 after losing a GOP primary — went on to say, “You have people who felt some allegiance to the party that are now really questioning, ‘Why am I [in the party?]’”

It was hardly her only comment along these lines. Just two days after the Jan. 6 attack, Murkowski was one of a tiny number of congressional GOP members who called for Trump’s immediate resignation. “I want him to resign. I want him out,” she said on Jan. 8, 2021. The senator added, in reference to her party’s then-president, “He needs to get out.”

She went on to tell The Anchorage Daily News, “I will tell you, if the Republican Party has become nothing more than the party of Trump, I sincerely question whether this is the party for me.”

As we discussed soon after, the Alaskan was one of Congress’ most interesting Republican members throughout the Trump era, repeatedly going her own way on key issues.

When her party tried to replace the Affordable Care Act with a far-right alternative, she balked. When her party rallied behind Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination, Murkowski was the only GOP senator to vote “no.” When Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell vowed to remain in “total coordination” with the White House during Trump’s first impeachment trial, she made her displeasure known.

And while Murkowski didn’t vote to convict Trump in his first impeachment trial, she was one of a handful of GOP senators to concede that his extortion scheme toward Ukraine was wrong — and she did vote with Democrats to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial.

All of which is to say, her latest comments didn't come out of nowhere, and if Murkowski does leave the Republican Party, no one in the GOP should say they weren't warned.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.