Ariel Edwards-Levy reports on a new survey for HuffPost that shows Republican voters and right-leaning independents who voted for Trump are likely to side with the president in any dispute with congressional Republicans.

In the case of a disagreement between Trump and Republicans in Congress, 52% of Republican and Republican-leaning independent voters say they’d be more likely to support Trump, according to the poll, conducted Dec. 15 through Sunday. Only 15% say they would side with the GOP legislators, with the rest saying they’d back neither or that they’re not sure.

Similarly, 62% say they would back Trump over their own representative, and just 14% say they would support the latter.

This is of immediate interest because Trump has vetoed the defense spending bill and threatened to veto the combination omnibus/COVID-19 relief bill, calling the latter a “disgrace.”

But these numbers are worth paying attention to in the longer term. In particular, the following numbers should be of intense interest:

A 42% plurality of Republican and Republican-leaning independents who voted for Trump in this year’s presidential election say they consider themselves more supporters of Trump than of the Republican Party. Just 21% feel that they are more supporters of the party, with another 31% saying they are supporters of both.

We won’t know what remains of the GOP until Trump has been out of office for a bit, but the GOP has plenty to worry about seeing that only one in five of their voters have more loyalty to the party than to the outgoing nutcase in the White House.

The party without Trump seems to have precious little strong support, and it’s just hard to figure out what unites the right going forward. Ideologically, it seems the base is immensely flexible, and definitely far more populist than the Paul Ryans of the world would like. They may be easiest to control simply by focusing their attention on opposing anything Biden wants to do, and Trump’s efforts to make Biden illegitimate will help in that respect, although it will also make it very hard to work with Biden on anything, and that will sometimes be politically disadvantageous.

Assuming Trump isn’t a candidate in four years, it will be very interesting to see how the presidential contenders try to differentiate themselves, since simply opposing Biden won’t do the trick.

The lack of any policy goals or clear and consistent ideological message is a new feature for the Republican Party, and in the short term it basically precludes any possibility of the kind of unity that Biden campaigned on.

The only good news is that the Republican Party seems to have shrunk considerably during the Trump Era, which has been masked by Trump’s cult of personality. I think a pretty sizable majority of the people are actually in Biden’s corner, and even bigger majority wants to see the GOP give him a chance to fix all the things that are obviously broken.

I don’t know how it will shake out, but I expect it to be acrimonious and yet ultimately unpredictable in terms of where the GOP heads next.