A Wall Street Journal poll published on Saturday shows that Donald Trump has the support of 59% of respondents, making him the clear frontrunner in the Republican primary.
The Wall Street Journal conducted a poll of 600 Republican primary voters at the end of August via telephone and online questionnaires, and the results show that the former president has a 46-point advantage over Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
The poll conducted in April, before DeSantis officially announced his candidature, showed him 13 points behind Trump. This reflected his recent polling struggles elsewhere and highlighted the governor’s challenges in trying Florida woo Trump voters.
DeSantis’s popularity also dipped since the poll in April, with the percentage of respondents who have a positive opinion of him falling from 84% to 70%. Between these identical polls, Trump’s approval rating went down from 78% to 75%.
If the election for president in 2024 were held today, the poll revealed that Trump and Joe Biden would each receive 46% of the vote, with 8% of registered voters still undecided. When voters’ preferences for third-party candidates are taken into account, Trump leads Biden by one percentage point (40% to 39%), with less well-known third-party candidates receiving less than 10% of the vote and 17% remaining undecided.
Beyond the top two candidates in the GOP primary, 8 percent of respondents chose former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, 5 percent chose biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, 3 percent chose former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, 2 percent chose former Vice President Mike Pence, and 2 percent chose Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.).
There was a small but noticeable increase in support for Haley, Ramaswamy, and Christie since April’s poll.
The poll also indicated that the vast majority of respondents think the four indictments against Trump are politically motivated. The charges against Trump range from attempting to reverse the election to inappropriately retaining secret data. All those polled reported being aware of the cases, with over 60% dismissing them all as baseless and influenced by politics.
