Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis is leading former President Donald Trump — by a small but notable margin — in a recent poll of likely voters in the 2024 Republican presidential primary in New Hampshire.
The numbers came from a new edition of the Granite State Poll conducted by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center. A full 39 percent of respondents indicated support for DeSantis, while only 37 percent said they backed Trump in the hypothetical match-up. The margin of error for that question was higher than the margin by which DeSantis led Trump, so the Florida governor didn’t lead by an insurmountable margin — but for anyone to lead Trump in a key state ahead of the 2024 presidential race might be a surprise to some. The numbers give a broader context to Trump’s continuing obsession with poll numbers, which he’s posted about on his alternative social media platform known as Truth Social. Relatedly, available info recently put DeSantis’s six-month fundraising total for the first half of this year ahead of the total brought in by a key joint fundraising committee helping lead the Trump fundraising operation.
The Save America Joint Fundraising Committee — that Trump-affiliated group, which distributes money to orgs affiliated with the former president — raised some $36 million from January to the end of June. DeSantis’s six-month total for the first half of 2022 was about $45 million, putting him some $9 million ahead of the ex-president. There are a couple of caveats: donations to that Trump group don’t reflect all of Trump’s fundraising haul, and DeSantis is actually running for something — re-election as Florida’s governor — while Trump has yet to formally confirm he’s running again at all. Thus, there’s a higher urgency behind donating to DeSantis. The Florida governor also hasn’t confirmed that he’ll be running in the 2024 GOP presidential race, but he’s been widely floated as a potential contender. A recent national poll measuring potential outcomes for the eventual 2024 GOP contest found DeSantis with about one-fourth of the support, while Trump had just about half.
DeSantis’s level of support in the Granite State Poll substantially rose since last October, when he had 18 percent of the support and Trump had 43 percent. One of the factors that’s attracted right-wingers to DeSantis is his aggressively hands-off approach to the COVID-19 pandemic in Florida. DeSantis is also a committed culture warrior on the side of the Right’s most dangerous causes. He recently indicated he’d be inclined towards brand new abortion restrictions in Florida after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, eliminating critical limits on the abilities of state officials to regulate abortion according to their political ambitions, no matter the health consequences.
