CNN
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Ron DeSantis has some catching up to do.
The Florida governor entered the 2024 presidential race last week with polls showing him trailing Donald Trump by an average of about 30 points in the Republican primary. DeSantis had been closer to 10 points at the end of last year.
The former president has had something to do with DeSantis’ problems, but it’s not all Trump’s fault. DeSantis, himself, has a bit of a “friendliness” problem among Republican voters.
One of the key metrics I look at to understand the choices made by primary voters is how many of them have “very favorable” or “very favorable” views of the candidates. Most primary voters will like most candidates because they are all from the same party. The key to standing out in a primary is to be liked (meaning highly rated).
DeSantis has seen his numbers drop with that score. Already in December, 40% of Republican voters in a Fox News poll he had a very favorable opinion of the governor of Florida. That was close to Trump’s 43%.
Last month, the same survey found DeSantis’ strongly favorable share of support dropping to 33%. Trump’s, meanwhile, jumped to 50%, widening the difference between the two candidates’ very favorable ratings from 3 points to 17 points. In the polling average, Trump’s lead over DeSantis in the horse race poll increased by about 20 points over the same period.
Republicans falling for DeSantis could be his downfall. Recall that Trump had relatively low “overall” favorability ratings compared to other Republicans in the 2016 primaries, but was able to win because his “very favorable” ratings were equal to, or in many cases better than, those of his competitors .
DeSantis’ overall favorability ratings among Republicans remain nearly unchanged on average. That might indicate he’s less liked than before, but Republicans may not see him as someone they’d be willing to fight for.
This matches some of the polls about how satisfied voters would be with a certain candidate. It’s a slightly broader measure, but it comes close to how happy voters would be with the candidate who is capable of winning the primary.
An ABC News/Washington Post poll released earlier this month found that 68 percent of Republican voters would be satisfied if DeSantis were the nominee. Only 22% would be dissatisfied. Those are good numbers for him, but he has two problems.
First, Trump did it even better. A whopping 76% of Republican voters would be satisfied with the former president as their running mate, while 21% would be dissatisfied.
Second, DeSantis’ numbers are going in the wrong direction. In December, it led the satisfaction score Monmouth University Survey. A staggering 79% of Republicans said they would be satisfied with him as the nominee, while 10% were dissatisfied.
Trump followed, with a split of 67% satisfied to 31% dissatisfied.
Digging a little deeper into the numbers, it appears that DeSantis’ problem is that Trump’s base has turned against him to some extent. While satisfaction among Republican college graduates with DeSantis as a candidate has remained steady (around 80%), the percentage among non-college graduates has dropped 20 points (around 60%).
Trump, of course, has a huge advantage among non-college graduates when compared to other Republicans in an electoral test.
That’s perhaps what makes DeSantis’ strategy since announcing his campaign quite interesting. He’s going after Trump more aggressively than in the past. This makes sense because he feels he has to bring Trump down a notch, given the former president’s massive lead in the polls.
The problem, though, is that Republican voters generally love Trump, and it’s not clear that someone attacking their man will change their vote. If anything, it could make Trump supporters have a more negative view of the person carrying out the attack.
I’m not entirely sure what DeSantis’ best strategy might be. I could argue the electability to say that he would be a stronger general election candidate than Trump. Polls are mixed on whether that matters to Republicans, but the case that DeSantis would be a better candidate than Trump in November 2024 isn’t as strong as you might think.
We know that sponsored by the Republicans state vote Overall, it has shown DeSantis doing better than Trump against President Joe Biden, but national public polls are murkier. In non-partisan polls that meet CNN’s publication standards, DeSantis does just 2 points better than Trump vs. Biden. In some of those polls, DeSantis fares no better.
A 2 point difference is almost meaningless at this early stage of the campaign.
The fact that there is so much time left for voting to begin is key for DeSantis. His official campaign is quite young compared to Trump’s. Perhaps being on the court will remind Republican voters of what they loved about DeSantis in the first place: his efforts to stand up to “woke” forces at home in Florida.
If DeSantis is making that argument instead of letting Trump set the terms of the compromise, he might be able to flip the script. Because if there’s one thing we know right now, it’s that what DeSantis has been doing for the past two months hasn’t worked.
