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(Trends Wide) — Ron DeSantis has some catching up to do. The Florida governor entered the 2024 presidential race last week with polls showing him some 30 points trailing Donald Trump in the Republican Party primary. At the end of last year, DeSantis was down 10 points.
The former president has something to do with DeSantis’s problems, but it’s not all Trump’s fault. DeSantis himself has a bit of a “charm” problem among Republican voters.
One of the key metrics I look at to understand the decisions of primary voters is how many of them have “strongly favorable” or “very favorable” opinions of the candidates. Most primary voters will like most of the candidates because they are all from the same party. The key to differentiating yourself in a primary is to be charming (ie, have a highly favorable rating).
DeSantis saw his numbers drop in this regard. In December, 40% of Republican voters in a Fox News poll had a strongly favorable opinion of the Florida governor. That figure was close to 43% for Trump.
Last month, the same poll found the percentage of support strongly favorable to DeSantis fell to 33%. Trump’s, meanwhile, jumped to 50% and widened the gap between the two candidates’ strongly favorable ratings from 3 points to 17 points. In the polling average, Trump’s lead over DeSantis in the poll shot up by about 20 points over the same period.
The Republicans’ disenchantment with DeSantis could be their undoing. Recall that Trump had relatively low “overall” favorability ratings compared to other Republicans in the 2016 primary, but was able to win because his “very favorable” ratings were on par with or in many cases better than those of his competitors.
DeSantis’ overall favorability ratings among Republicans are largely unchanged on average. This might indicate that he’s no less unlikable than he was before, but Republicans may not see him as someone they’d be willing to hit for.
This coincides with some surveys on the degree of voter satisfaction with a specific candidate. It’s a slightly broader measure, but it comes down to how happy voters would be with the candidate who is capable of winning the primary.
An ABC News/Washington Post poll released earlier this month found that 68% of Republican voters would be satisfied if DeSantis were the pick. Only 22% would be dissatisfied. They are good figures for him, but he has two problems.
First, Trump did even better. A whopping 76% of Republican voters would be satisfied with the former president as their nominee, while 21% would be dissatisfied.
Second, DeSantis’ numbers are going in the wrong direction. In December, he was leading the satisfaction score in the Monmouth University survey. A staggering 79% of Republicans said they would be happy with him as a candidate, while 10% were dissatisfied.
Trump trailed behind, with a split of 67% satisfied to 31% dissatisfied.
Chasing Trump’s base
Digging a bit deeper into the numbers, it seems DeSantis’ problem is that Trump’s base turned against him to some degree. While satisfaction among Republican college graduates with DeSantis as their nominee remains stable (around 80%), the percentage among non-college graduates has dropped 20 points (around 60%).
Trump has a huge advantage among college undergraduates when compared to other Republicans on an electoral test.
This is perhaps what makes DeSantis’ strategy since he announced his campaign quite interesting. He is going after Trump more aggressively than in the past. That makes sense in that he feels he has to take Trump down, given the former president’s huge lead in the polls.
The problem, however, is that Republican voters in general love Trump, and someone attacking their man hasn’t been known to change their vote. If anything, it could make Trump supporters take a more negative view of the person he’s attacking.
I’m not entirely sure what the best strategy for DeSantis might be. He could use the eligibility argument to say that he would be a stronger candidate than Trump in the general election. Polls are mixed on whether Republicans care about that, but the case that DeSantis would be a better candidate than Trump in November 2024 isn’t as strong as you might think.
We know that Republican-sponsored state polls generally show DeSantis doing better than Trump against President Joe Biden, but national public polls are more complex. In nonpartisan polls that meet Trends Wide’s standards for publication, DeSantis does just 2 points better than Trump against Biden. Several of these polls don’t do better for DeSantis.
A 2-point difference is almost negligible at this early stage of the campaign.
The fact that there is so much time until voting begins is key for DeSantis. His official campaign is quite young compared to Trump’s. Perhaps being on the road will remind Republican voters of what they loved about DeSantis in the first place: his efforts to deal with the “woke” forces back home in Florida.
If DeSantis is out there making that argument instead of allowing Trump to set the terms of the engagement, he may be able to flip the script. Because if there’s one thing we know right now, it’s that what DeSantis has been doing for the past few months hasn’t worked.
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