Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) will not rule out ditching her party as Donald Trump coasts to the 2024 nomination, she revealed in an interview with CNN that aired on Sunday.
“I wish that as Republicans, we had … a nominee that I could get behind,” Murkowski told CNN’s Manu Raju. “I certainly can’t get behind Donald Trump.”
“Oh, I think I’m very independent-minded,” Murkowski said when asked whether she’d consider becoming one of a handful of independents in Congress. When Raju pressed her a bit more on whether she’d consider registering as an independent who would caucus with Republicans, she simply replied, “I am navigating my way through some very interesting political times. Let’s just leave it at that.”
Murkowski jumped late into the Republican presidential primary with an endorsement of former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley just ahead of Super Tuesday in March. But, after a lackluster performance, Haley dropped out a few days later, leaving Murkowski to declare her “regret that our party is seemingly becoming a party of Donald Trump.”
The Alaska Senator regularly broke with her own party during the last two years of Trump’s term, voting in line with Trump’s position just 57.5 percent of the time. (The only Senate Republican who did so less frequently was Maine Senator Susan Collins, who also endorsed Haley ahead of Super Tuesday.) In a number of major moments, Murkowski went against Trump’s wishes: she voted against his nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in 2018, supported Joe Biden’s nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson in 2022, and cast a ballot to impeach Trump for his conduct on January 6, 2021.
These votes put Murkowski in the crosshairs of Trump and his allies—the GOP frontrunner dubbed her a RINO and called her “worse than a Democrat”— she successfully won re-election to a fifth full term in 2022, fending off a Trump-endorsed challenger (“Get any candidate ready, good or bad, I don’t care, I’m endorsing,” Trump wrote on Twitter ahead of that election. “If you have a pulse, I’m with you!”)
In recent months, Murkowski has stepped up her criticism of Trump. In December, she described Trump’s anti-immigrant comments, in which he characterized immigrants as “poisoning the blood” of the United States, as “hateful, harmful rhetoric.” She has also criticized his description of January 6 prisoners as “hostages” and “patriots.” And she recently took aim at Trump’s comments calling Jewish Democratic voters people who “hate” their religion, telling CNN that the statement was “incredibly wrong” and “awful.”
Yet despite her refusal to cast a ballot for Trump, Murkowski has maintained that she will not be voting for President Joe Biden in 2024, telling NBC earlier this month that she “can’t vote for Biden.”
