A tangentially related anecdote.
I love to mountain bike. And I drive a Subaru. Not unusual for Colorado, but something that would normally peg one as a Democrat.
At the trailhead one day in uber-conservative Colorado Springs, I ran into a lawyer who’d moved there from out of town. She must have pegged me for one of her own kind because she openly admitted to me that she was a liberal to the nth power, but joined the local Republican party. Just because that’s the only way she could really throw a wrench in the Republican works in that part of the state.
Not everyone who claims to be a Republican actually is.
That includes most of the “leadership” of the Republican Party, if one still believes that the Republican Party is not simply a Division of the Democrat Party tasked with providing an Official and Approved Opposition..