A plurality of Republican primary voters who watched the second GOP debate Wednesday evening said Florida governor Ron DeSantis outperformed the other six candidates on stage, according to a new poll.
Thirty-three percent of voters who tuned in said DeSantis performed best while Nikki Haley came in a distant second at 18 percent, according to a 538/Washington Post/Ipsos poll conducted immediately after the debate. Biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy came in third at 15 percent, and the rest of the field failed to break 6 percent respectively.
While the results are undoubtedly encouraging for DeSantis, the impact of his performance may be limited as two-thirds of Republican voters who previously participated in the pre-debate section of the survey did not watch the primetime debate at all. Only 32 percent reported having watched the debate, with 14 percent saying they watched all of it and 18 percent saying they watched at least some of it.
South Carolina senator Tim Scott, former vice president Mike Pence, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, and North Dakota governor Doug Burgum also took the stage at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California Wednesday night.
Of the 68 percent of primary voters who did not watch the debate, only 4 percent said they watched former president Donald Trump’s speech to Michigan autoworkers, which he delivered just ahead of the debate in order to upstage his GOP rivals.
The debate performances delivered by the rest of the field do not appear to have weakened Trump: Among respondents who viewed the debate, Trump secured a 60 percent favorable rating, outpacing those candidates who did debate. DeSantis came in a close second with a 58 percent favorability rating post-debate. Haley was the third most favorable candidate at 46 percent.
When asked who they’re considering voting for in the 2024 Republican primary, the majority of voters put Trump at the top of their lists. DeSantis and Haley remained in second and third, respectively.
The post-debate part of the 538/Washington Post/Ipsos survey was conducted from Wednesday to Thursday among 2,262 likely Republican primary voters, down considerably from an initial 5,002 respondents in the pre-debate survey leading up to the debate.