Last week, Florida’s governor entered the 2024 presidential race despite being trailing Donald Trump in the Republican primary by an average of 30 points, according to polls. At the end of 2017, DeSantis was down by over 10 points.
Trump is not solely to blame for DeSantis’ difficulties, but the former president has contributed. Among Republican voters, DeSantis faces a “lovability” problem.
I find that the percentage of primary voters who rate each candidate as either “strongly favourable” or “very favourable” helps me make sense of their final decisions. As members of the same party, most primary voters will feel a strong affinity for the majority of candidates. Being well-liked (that is, having a high strongly favourable rating) is the best way to stand out in a primary.
The numbers for DeSantis have been going down. According to a Fox News poll from last December, the Florida governor had a 60% favourable rating among Republican voters. It was close to Trump’s 43% in that poll.
In the same poll conducted last month, only 33% of respondents said they had a very favourable impression of DeSantis. However, Trump’s rating increased to 50%, widening the difference between the two candidates’ extremely positive ratings from 3% to 17%. Trump’s lead against DeSantis in the polls has increased by around 20 points over the same time span, according to an average of surveys.
The potential failure of DeSantis lies in the fact that Republicans may lose interest in him. Remember that Trump’s “overall” favorability ratings in the 2016 Republican primary were lower than those of his competitors, but that he still managed to win because his “very favourable” ratings were on par with, or even better than, those of his rivals.
The majority of Republicans continue to hold about the same favourable opinion of DeSantis. This might mean that Republicans no longer perceive him as someone worth fighting for, even though his overall unpopularity hasn’t changed.
This lines up with findings from surveys asking voters how happy they would be with certain candidates. It’s a larger indicator, but it shows how satisfied voters would be with the eventual nominee.
Sixty-eight percent of Republican voters in a survey conducted by ABC News and the Washington Post earlier this month said they would be happy if DeSantis became the nominee. About a quarter, or 22%, would be unhappy. He’s in a decent financial position, but there are two issues.
Trump, for one, improved upon it. Seventy-six percent of Republican voters are fine with the former president being their nominee, while only twenty-one percent are unhappy with the choice.
Second, support for DeSantis is decreasing. In a poll conducted by Monmouth University in December, he had the highest satisfaction rating. When asked whether they would be happy or unhappy if he were the nominee, an overwhelming majority of Republicans (79%) answered they would be happy.
Trump lagged behind with a satisfaction rating of 67% compared to 31%.
Attempting to provoke Trump’s core supporters
A deeper look at the figures reveals that one of DeSantis’ biggest problems is that a portion of the Trump base has turned against him. While DeSantis’s approval rating among Republican college graduates has stayed consistent (about 80%), it has plummeted 20 points among non-college graduates (to roughly 60%).
When pitted against other Republicans in a vote, Trump naturally has a huge edge among non-college graduates.
Perhaps it is for this reason that DeSantis’ approach since launching his campaign has been so intriguing. He is attacking Trump with greater vigour than in the past. That makes sense, since the former president has such a large lead in the polls that he likely believes he must try to bring Trump down a peg or two.
The problem, though, is that Republican voters like Trump, and it’s unclear whether or not an opponent’s attacks will sway their vote. To the contrary, it might make Trump supporters see the attacker with even less favour.
For the life of me, I can’t figure out what DeSantis should do. The electability argument would support his claim that he would do better against Trump in a presidential election. While opinion polls show a divide among Republicans on this issue, the argument that DeSantis would be a better candidate than Trump in November 2024 isn’t nearly as compelling as you might expect.
Public national polling is more opaque, but we know that Republican-sponsored state polls have generally shown DeSantis doing better than Trump against President Joe Biden. Even though DeSantis fares slightly better than Trump does against Biden, he only does so by two points in nonpartisan polls that fulfil AWN’s publication standards. DeSantis is performing poorly in a number of these polls.
At this juncture in the campaign, a two-point differential means very little.
For DeSantis, the fact that there is still a long time until voting begins is crucial. In comparison to Trump’s, his official campaign launched very recently. DeSantis’s efforts to take on the “woke” forces in his home state of Florida may be what won him the support of Republican voters.
If DeSantis goes out and makes that case, rather than letting Trump dictate the terms of the debate, he may be able to change the dynamic. Because if there’s one thing we know for sure, it’s that DeSantis’s strategy over the previous several months has been a failure.
