Recent polling from Florida shows many residents of that state dissatisfied with the direction their home state is taking under the prominent leadership of Florida GOP Governor Ron DeSantis and his Republican allies in the state legislature, who control both of its chambers.
In the April-May numbers, a full 50 percent of respondents said they felt Florida is on the wrong track, eight percent more than said the opposite. In February polling from this same source, only 42 percent said they felt their state was heading in the wrong direction. (These numbers are from a pair of cooperating organizations called Progress Florida and Florida Watch.) As for DeSantis’s personal levels of disapproval from Floridians, that rate of discontent was also near an overall majority, with 49 percent disapproving and 50 percent approving in the newer survey numbers. Approval from Floridians for DeSantis’s job performance was twenty percentage points ahead of disapproval in polling from this same source in February.
The organization’s polling also found general opposition among Floridians to some of the policies recently pursued by the state’s Republicans. A full 56 percent opposed the six-week abortion ban recently signed into law by DeSantis, and 78 percent opposed the allowance of concealed carry (meaning covertly carrying a firearm) without a permit — though DeSantis himself has previously expressed support for allowing even open carry without permitting.
DeSantis is now running for president, though it’s unclear he’ll get very far, considering Donald Trump still has a substantial lead in nearly all relevant surveys. None of the other potential or confirmed contenders for the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 2024 have come anywhere close, largely seeing levels of support in those polls just in the single digits. That includes Nikki Haley, Asa Hutchinson, Tim Scott, Mike Pence, and others. DeSantis might have a hard time getting elected to anything in the future given these latest numbers, which stem from polling that was finished May 3.
