With the pulling last week of the beleaguered American Health Care Act (AHCA) by Paul Ryan from a vote in congress, the limits of the republican party’s loyalty to Trump seem for the first time to have been properly shaken. A close ideological parity of republicans to their latest president has never been very believable but until now their rigid allegiance of pragmatism has held strong, with a few notable exceptions from the likes of John McCain and Lindsey Graham.

This is a heartening progression, and seems also to be reflected in republican voters. The results of the latest poll by Quinnipiac University, Trump’s support amongst republicans has fallen over the past two weeks from 91 – 5 approval to disapproval, to 81-14. It is not only significant here that his approval has fallen by 10%, but that disapproval has almost tripled. This, of course, is not entirely down to the failure of the AHCA. The Whitehouse has had a bad week – with wire tapping allegations blamed on Britain’s GCHQ, Trump’s bizarre behaviour with the German premier, Trump family corruption, and of course the ongoing FBI investigation into the Trump team’s links to Russia.

By and large however, it seems the case that the AHCA has played at least some role in this decline. The repeal of the Affordable Care Act and it’s replacement with ‘something terrific’ was one of Trump’s rallying cries during his campaign. When voters were confronted with the fact that ‘something terrific’ would not be the lower deductibles and reduced premiums they had been promised, but higher prices and less robust coverage, they were understandably unhappy.

Healthcare has long since been a toxic subject in American politics, and the ACA has been besieged since it’s proposal by a barrage of ‘fake news’ aimed to undermine it. Indeed, Politifact’s ‘lie of the year’ in 2009 was Sarah Palin’s infamous suggestion that over 75s would have to face ‘death panels’. This assertion, apparently, has not been banished from the republican party’s lexicon. A republican official in Florida was shouted down by a town hall full of angry citizens for making this claim even this year, eight years following the lie’s inception. The ‘death of facts’ in anglo-american politics has grown increasingly alarming in recent years, culminating in UK MP Michael Gove’s notorious claim that the British people had ‘had enough of experts’. In the US at least, it seems that this may be beginning to change.

When studies are conducted into how and when people change their minds, the results on the surface seem pretty depressing. Taking the example of the death panels claim, Nyhan et al published a study in 2013 into how people across the political spectrum responded to fact-checks on their beliefs. The team found that, for those that maintained an active interest in politics and viewed Palin favourably, by disproving these beliefs researchers actually reinforced the convictions of those who believed in the death panels lie. Interestingly, for those less interested in politics who viewed Palin favourably, the disproving of the death panels claim was much more likely to change their minds. This idea of politics as an identity rather than a factual discourse is one which seems to be increasingly the case, as polarization and partisanship only continues to intensify.

This also goes some way to explaining how Trump, a man who has spent his life building himself into a brand, has been able to command such loyalty from his voters. Trump represents an identity, and fact checking can do little to change the minds of the converted.

This is not to say that republican voters’ brand loyalty cannot be shaken, just that it is more difficult than ‘proving them wrong’. Coming to terms with the fact that something you believe so strongly, something that you have co-opted into your own idea of yourself, is wrong is pretty difficult to come to terms with. This is something I experienced first hand in British politics, wrangling with my previous support for Jeremy Corbyn in the wake of Brexit. It is a feeling of personal betrayal.

A lot of things have to happen before people will change their minds. In a paper published by Redlawsk et al in 2010 the authors sought to find this ‘tipping point’. Their findings, for the most part, echoed those of Nyhan et al, namely that once a voter had adopted positive feelings for a candidate through early exposure to them, negative stories on them will serve, at least to begin with, to reinforce those positive feelings. They found that if the stories they read on their preferred candidate ranged between 10-20% negative, their support for the candidate remained unchanged or was even reinforced. This cycle of reinforcement was found to have a limit however: ‘if enough negative information is encountered to heighten the voter’s anxiety about the preferred candidate, affective intelligence suggests that he or she will become more careful in processing additional new information… This increased anxiety and careful processing may lead to an affective tipping point where additional negative information begins to generate downward adjustments to the evaluation’. The threshold at which the volume of negative stories began to influence feelings toward the candidate was found to range between 40 and 80%.

It seems that with the abject failure of the AHCA, this threshold is beginning to be reached. The bill was attacked from both sides, those on the left lamenting the massive hike in premiums and the CBO’s estimation that 24 million US citizens would lose their health insurance. Those on the right criticized the bill for not going far enough and essentially offering a worse version of Obamacare. Even press outlets that have been among Trump’s staunchest supporters such as Breitbart have criticized the bill. When coupled with the fact that it is the demographics most supportive of Trump that would have been hit the hardest by the bill, it is clear to see why some republicans seem to be re-evaluating their allegiances.

It is hard to say whether this will be just another pothole over which the Trump administration relentlessly plows or whether it will be the beginning of the end, but it does indeed seem that some republican voters are beginning to enter the crisis point. Trumps next agenda item, which seems in essence to be the general slashing of taxes for the wealthy, does not seem to be something for which the typical Trump voter has an appetite for, but the question of where they turn is a question yet to be answered.