Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is well liked by potential Republican primary voters, but an overwhelming majority still believe that Donald Trump is the strongest candidate to lead the party in 2024, according to a poll.
A Monmouth University survey, conducted before DeSantis confirmed he is running for president on May 24, showed that nearly half (45 percent) of GOP voters believe that Trump is “definitely” the best Republican candidate to beat President Joe Biden next year, with 18 percent saying it is “probably” Trump.
Fewer than one-third of those taking part in the survey believe that another candidate should probably win the 2024 GOP primary (19 percent), or that another Republican definitely should (13 percent).
The poll also showed that Republican voters have similarly favorable views of Trump (77 percent favorable and 17 percent unfavorable) and DeSantis (73 percent favorable and 12 percent unfavorable). However, the Florida governor has been slowly slipping in the polls and momentum for his campaign was fading before it officially began.
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In a hypothetical head-to-head primary contest between the pair, Trump received 56 percent of support from GOP voters, with 35 percent saying they would pick DeSantis for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination.
In a previous Monmouth poll in February, DeSantis led Trump by 53 percent to 40 percent, and was also the preferred candidate for several key Republican demographics such as evangelical Republicans (51 percent to 44 percent), those who describe themselves as “very conservative” (53 percent to 43 percent) and moderate voters (51 percent to 38 percent).
In the latest Monmouth Poll, Trump now leads DeSantis among nearly every major voting bloc in the party, with college graduates the only demographic who still say they would prefer the Florida governor.
“DeSantis lost ground even before he got out of the starting gate,” Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute, said in a statement. “Republican voters still like him, but they haven’t heard a convincing case for why he would be the party’s best option.”
When those taking part in the survey were asked who they would like to see lead the Republican party in 2024, without being given a list of names, 43 percent named Trump. In comparison, 19 percent named DeSantis unprompted, down 27 percent from March and 33 percent from February.
Murray said that DeSantis will struggle to convince enough voters that he could win the GOP primary next year, even if he starts to claw back the deficit in the polls now he is an official candidate.
“If your main argument to Republican voters is that Trump wouldn’t be the party’s strongest nominee, you’ve got a heck of a challenge ahead of you,” Murray said.
“There’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem with assessing electability. As we found in our polling during the 2020 Democratic primaries, if voters back a candidate based on issues or character they also tend to feel that candidate is the most electable,” he said. “However, this still underscores the larger point in this poll. If your message to voters who support Trump is he cannot win, you are going to hit a brick wall.”
“Even if you eat into the group who thinks he is only ‘probably’ the strongest candidate, you may still not capture enough of the Republican electorate to overcome Trump’s hardcore base support,” Murray said.
The Monmouth University Poll of 655 Republican and Republican-leaning voters was conducted by telephone and online from May 18 to 24. The results have a margin of error of +/- 5.5 percentage points.