It doesn’t seem that Florida GOP Governor Ron DeSantis, who recently won his second term in his current position by a massive margin, is actually particularly close — at all — to nabbing the Republican presidential nomination ahead of the 2024 election.
Despite potentially promising initial showings, he’s slowly sinking — and definitely not rising — in national surveys conducted in the 2024 Republican presidential contest, according to an average of the relevant data assembled by the elections data and analysis site FiveThirtyEight. As of Thursday afternoon, his average portion of support stood at just above 25 percent. While he was far ahead of support seen for the prominent contenders, like Nikki Haley and Asa Hutchinson, who’ve actually confirmed their candidacies, he was way behind Trump.
Sure, Trump is facing a mounting series of serious court proceedings, from the criminal case in Manhattan tying back to hush money given to Stormy Daniels before the 2016 presidential race to potentially future criminal cases from issues like his harboring of classified documents and attempts involving and around him to essentially overturn the 2020 presidential election results, but Republicans persist in their support anyway.
In YouGov polling conducted in association with The Economist mostly this week, Trump ended up 22 percentage points ahead of DeSantis on the national level, according to FiveThirtyEight’s recap. In a survey also conducted by YouGov but that time in association with Yahoo News, Trump had a lead over DeSantis in the double digits whether just the two were considered or more candidates were included. Further, in additional recent polls from sources like Morning Consult and Ipsos, the trend is consistent, with Trump way ahead of all other contenders — including the Florida governor. Trump, whose endorsement once helped DeSantis secure the Republican nomination ahead of his first term, has been relentlessly lambasting the Florida governor, evidently taking even the possibility of a presidential run from the figure as an unconscionable betrayal.
DeSantis, despite his lack of a declared campaign, has taken steps clearly in that rhetorical vein, seemingly angling to expand his profile outside of Florida. He even produced a book, and he’s also been taking trips outside Florida, including for a high-profile speech at an institution in southern California associated with former President Ronald Reagan. The last time he led against Trump in polling among what has been collected by FiveThirtyEight appears to have been in March — and there have been, well, a lot of polling results since that point. Apparently measures like the six-week abortion ban he recently signed aren’t overwhelmingly popular.
