Supporting Vote Republican for a time (4)
I believe the answer is:
year
'a time' is the definition.
(I've seen this before)
'supporting vote republican' is the wordplay.
'supporting' says to put letters next to each other (in a down clue, some letters go under others).
'vote' becomes 'yea' (I've seen this before).
'republican' becomes 'r' (abbreviation).
'yea'+'r' is 'YEAR'.
'for' is the link.
(Other definitions for year that I've seen before include "Period of revolution" , "Period of earth's orbit" , "One-tenth of a decade" , "Group of students" , "12 months" .)