Donald Trump is not a lock for the 2024 nomination from Republicans for president.
A recent survey from the University of New Hampshire shows him losing to Florida GOP Governor Ron DeSantis in a hypothetical match-up in the 2024 primaries by 12 percent, with 42 percent of respondents supporting DeSantis and just 30 percent behind Trump. The results reflect the opinions of likely voters in the GOP’s presidential primary in New Hampshire specifically. In results from when respondents were asked for their first choice, no other candidate was in the double-digits. Nikki Haley, a former official in the Trump administration and ex-governor of South Carolina, was in third, with just eight percent of the support. Although other survey data has found Trump leading, this poll was released late last week, so it’s still relatively current. DeSantis hasn’t announced a presidential campaign, but discussion of the governor as a potential candidate has proven expansive and ongoing.
Trump has actually lost support — 17 percentage points of it — since the middle of 2021, according to this same set of data. In numbers dated from July 2021, Trump was at 47 percent, and DeSantis reached just 19 percent. The governor, then, has obviously seen a substantial jump in his profile since that time period. In addition, a portion of respondents much larger than those saying the same of Trump indicated they had a favorable opinion of DeSantis. For the governor, 73 percent indicated such a view, while for Trump, that was 47 percent, per this iteration of the Granite State Poll. (That’s among likely voters in the GOP presidential primary again.)
Trump recently visited New Hampshire in what was one of his first actual campaign stops since confirming he was running for president, delivering a speech that hit familiar beats and that New Hampshire GOP Governor Chris Sununu derided as generally low-energy in a weekend appearance on CNN. Sununu also said he didn’t believe Trump would win the New Hampshire primary. “The response we’ve received is, he read his teleprompter, he stuck to the talking points, he went away,” the governor said. “So, he’s not really bringing that fire, that energy I think that a lot of folks saw in ’16. I think in many ways it was a little disappointing to some folks. Even he acknowledged it wasn’t his best. He came to a predetermined crowd — not one of his big rallies. So I think a lot of folks understand that he’s going to be a candidate, but he’s also going to have to earn it.”
