Nearly a third of Virginia Republicans will vote for Hillary Clinton, pick a third-party candidate or sit out the election if Donald Trump is the GOP’s nominee for president, a new poll finds.

Democrats in the key swing state are far less likely to defect if Clinton is the nominee, with just 9 percent saying they would vote for someone else or stay home on Election Day, according to a Christopher Newport University survey released Thursday.

Trump’s “loyalty gap,” as CNU researchers dubbed it, could cost the celebrity developer the race in Virginia, where the survey finds the former secretary of state leads Trump 44 percent to 35 percent.

The poll, conducted CNU’s Wason Center for Public Policy, comes just two days after Republicans and Democrats alike expressed dissatisfaction with their parties’ respective front runners by handing Wisconsin primary victories to Republican Ted Cruz and Democrat Bernie Sanders.

The CNU poll was designed to see how that intraparty angst would play out in Virginia if Trump and Clinton ultimately face off in the general election.

“We found a real loyalty gap,” Quentin Kidd, director of the Wason Center, said in a written statement. “If Donald Trump turns out to be the Republican nominee, it’s clear that a very significant proportion of Republican voters will either defect or stay home. But it looks like most Democrats – even those who backed Bernie Sanders in the March primary – would support Clinton.”

If Clinton is the party’s nominee, just 4 percent of Virginia Democrats say they would vote for Trump, 3 percent would opt for a third-party candidate and 2 percent would not vote. Even so-called millennials, the voters ages 18 to 34 who have strongly favored Sanders over Clinton, prefer her to Trump by a 22-point margin.

At the same time, a sizable chunk of Virginia’s GOP electorate appears ready to bolt if Trump is the nominee. Thirteen percent say they would vote for Clinton, another 13 percent say they would opt for a third-party candidate and 3 percent say they would not vote at all.

Despite strong objections to Trump, a majority of Virginia Republicans and Republican-leaning independents oppose using a brokered convention to thwart his nomination, with 57 percent against the idea and 36 percent in favor.

“There’s a sizable distaste for Trump among Virginia Republican voters,” Rachel Bitecofer, director of the Wason Center Survey Research Lab, said in a written statement. “Almost a third would defect or stay home in November. A solid third like the idea of stopping him in July by giving the nomination to another candidate in a brokered convention. This adds up to a real advantage for Clinton in purple Virginia.”

The poll was based on 1,167 interviews of registered Virginia voters, contacted via land lines and cell phones between March 23 and April 3. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percent.

(c) 2016, The Washington Post · Laura Vozzella