New Polls Suggest DeSantis Is Starting To Steamroll Trump’s Second-Term Ambitions

A pair of polls out this week suggest that early in the 2024 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, a man who hasn’t even said whether he is running or not is ahead of the guy who already announced that he is with great fanfare.The guy said to be still on the fence is Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis. The other is a man considered until very recently to be a shoo-in for the nomination, President Trump.The most recent poll is from the Wall Street Journal and was released Wednesday. Republican primary voters told the Journal that they view Mr. DeSantis more favorably than Mr. Trump these days, and in an hypothetical contest between the two men the former would edge out the latter 52 percent to 38 percent. Around 86 percent of the 1,500 respondents polled last week said they like Mr. DeSantis; 74 percent said they had a favorable opinion of Mr. Trump.The favorable views of Mr. Trump are the lowest recorded by the Journal since November of last year, and have been declining since the GOP’s dismal showing during last month’s midterm elections. Mr. Trump saw most of his hand-picked candidates go down to Democratic challengers, and many Republicans have tried to blame the party’s failure to take control of the Senate on the former president.Mr. Trump is the only Republican so far to have announced his intention to run for a third time, declaring that he wanted to “make America great and glorious again.” On Wednesday, he teased a “major announcement” for Thursday in a social media post, but other than saying “America needs a superhero,” he offered no further details.In the month since he announced, however, Mr. Trump has remained relatively cloistered at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. He has made no campaign appearances or staff announcements, opting instead to make public pronouncements via his Truth Social Twitter knock-off and appearing via video link at events such as the Republican Jewish Coalition meeting in Las Vegas which was attended in person by most of the other potential Republican candidates.The second poll dogging the former president this week came from USA Today and Suffolk University, which also reported cratering Republican support for Mr. Trump among GOP voters. By a 2-to-1 margin — 61 percent to 31 percent — Republicans polled by USA Today said they support the policy objectives pursued by Mr. Trump but would prefer another face to be leading the effort.Two-thirds of Republican respondents to the survey, or 56 percent, said they would prefer Mr. DeSantis as president over Mr. Trump, who polled at 33 percent. “Republicans and conservative independents increasingly want Trumpism without Trump,” said the director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, David Paleologos.USA Today characterized the results of the survey of 1,000 registered voters as a “red flag” for the former president, whose popularity remained steadfast until very recently despite the non-stop antagonism directed at him by the mainstream media and his Democratic opponents. Surveys by the paper in July suggested that 60 percent of Republicans wanted Mr. Trump to run again. In October, that number dropped to 56 percent. Now, it has fallen to 47 percent.

New Polls Suggest DeSantis Is Starting To Steamroll Trump’s Second-Term Ambitions

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