Arkansas State Senator Jim Hendren announced in a video this week that he is leaving the Republican party, and he’s made it clear that his concerns about what’s happened to the GOP in the Trump era are the big reason why.
Hendren spoke with CNN’s Poppy Harlow Friday night and said the conservative principles he embraced years ago “have all taken a backseat now to a personality.”
“When I saw what happened after the election, I just can’t be part of that anymore,” he said.
Hendren’s video referenced the Capitol riots as the “final straw” for him.
“The state of politics has gotten so partisan now that there’s a tremendous resistance to people working across the aisle,” Hendren continued on CNN. “For me, in order to build something that is possible for that kind of productive government to work, I needed to leave the Republican party because of the extreme partisanship.”
Harlow asked Hendren about Trump still having such a strong hold on the GOP.
Hendren said he thinks there’s a “huge gap in the middle”:
“There are so many people who do not have a political home right now, including my four adult children, which has been a big factor in my decision. They don’t want to be part of the 75 percent who say we’re going to
follow Trump regardless of where he takes us. And they don’t feel comfortable with the far-left wing policies of the Democratic party.”
You can watch above, via CNN.