Only two events have changed the trajectory of the race.
Only two events have changed the trajectory of the race.
I f you look at the RealClearPolitics average of national GOP presidential-primary polls over the past twelve months, you see that there have been only two major turning points.
In the summer and fall of 2022, the national polling average showed Donald Trump steadily leading Ron DeSantis by about 30 points. Trump led 52.5 percent to 19.3 percent in late October.
Then came the first major turning point: The midterm elections, in which DeSantis won Florida by a whopping 19.4 points while kooky Trump-backed candidates cost the GOP the Senate. Trump announced his presidential campaign on November 15, but DeSantis immediately shot up in the polls and cut Trump’s 30-point lead down to 13 points by January.
That’s roughly where the national polling of the race stood until the second major turning point — Alvin Bragg’s indictment of Trump, which was widely criticized across the ideological spectrum — occurred on March 30. Trump almost immediately regained his 30-point lead and has consistently held it ever since.
There have been some big news stories in the presidential primary since then. DeSantis’s glitchy and insular May 25 campaign announcement on Twitter Spaces was widely ridiculed. The June 9 federal indictment of Trump for illegally hoarding classified national-defense information at Mar-a-Lago was widely considered to be damning. But nothing since the Bragg indictment has significantly moved the needle in national polls.
What does that lack of movement tell us? Obviously, it’s very good news for Trump that he has consistently held a 30-point lead since April and that he’s above 50 percent in the national average. Just eyeballing it, I thought DeSantis had something like a two-in-five shot of winning the nomination when Trump led him by 15 points in the RCP national average, 45 to 30. That now it feels closer to a one-in-five shot with Trump ahead 53 to 20.
The pessimist’s case against DeSantis is that a majority of Republican primary voters are simply wedded to Trump, and there’s little DeSantis can do or say to change that fact. If Bragg’s questionable indictment caused Trump to regain his 30-point lead and the damning Mar-a-Lago indictment did nothing to put a dent in that lead, then what exactly will drive Trump’s national numbers back down to where they need to be — the low forties — for DeSantis to have a path to victory?
The optimist’s case for DeSantis is that we don’t have a national primary, and the race is still fluid enough for him to score an early victory that drives Trump’s numbers back down to where they were in February 2023 while driving the other GOP challengers from the race soon thereafter. In January, a University of New Hampshire poll of the first-in-the-nation primary showed DeSantis ahead by twelve points, 42 percent to 30 percent. But in April, the same survey found Trump ahead by 20 points, 42 percent to 22 percent. The latest edition of the poll has Trump leading DeSantis 37 percent to 23 percent. With six months to go, that’s still a real race.
To say that DeSantis has his work cut out for him is an understatement. The fights DeSantis has tried to pick since March on Ukraine, vaccines, and Disney — whatever you think of them on the merits — have clearly not helped him gain support, and it’s hard to see those issues helping DeSantis consolidate the support of half of GOP primary voters.
What made DeSantis popular in the first place was a series of actions that drove the media to hysterics but were supported by voters — keeping Florida open in the fall of 2020; banning instruction on transgenderism and sexual orientation in certain public-school classes; chartering a plane to fly illegal immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard to expose the hypocrisy of progressives. Can DeSantis successfully remind GOP voters at the debates that he’s the Republican who can both own the libs and win bigly? It’s possible, but the debates are just as much an opportunity for the other GOP candidates, such as Tim Scott, to take off.
The lack of movement in the polls doesn’t mean that the events of the past few months haven’t mattered. Everything happening now is setting the stage for what will follow. But for the last two months, the media narrative of “DeSantis in decline” hasn’t really been accurate. It’s been a remarkably stable race.