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.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a vocal critic of former President Donald Trump, signaled that she would be open to leaving the Republican Party. Pressed on whether she is considering becoming an independent, Murkowski replied, “I’m very independent-minded,” adding, “I just regret that our party is seemingly becoming a party of Donald Trump.”
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.”








