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Saturday, September 30, 2023
Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly-ish polling roundup.
In his presidential campaign, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has pitched himself as a transformational leader who has reshaped the politics of his home state. His 2022 reelection by 19 percentage points “was not just a big victory,” he has argued. “It was really a fundamental realignment of Florida from being a swing state to being a red state.” And most political analysis agrees that the Sunshine State, once known for its impossibly close elections, is now a comfortably Republican-leaning state.
Is the 2024 Republican presidential primary already over? If you just look at the polls, you’d be forgiven for thinking so. Consider the state of the states: Several polls published last week showed former President Donald Trump leading in Iowa (with 42 percent to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s 19 percent and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott’s 9 percent), New Hampshire (at 50 percent versus DeSantis at 11 and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy at 10 percent) and South Carolina (at 48 percent versus 14 percent for both DeSantis and Scott). And in national polls, Trump currently has the support of 50 percent of GOP primary voters — a slide of 2 percentage points since last Wednesday’s GOP primary debate, but still a commanding lead over his opponents.
The second Republican presidential primary debate is less than two weeks away, so time is running out for GOP contenders to meet the Republican National Committee’s qualification criteria. To make the Sept. 27 debate, each candidate must have at least 3 percent support in two qualifying national polls, or at least 3 percent in one national survey and that same figure in polls from two different early voting states, conducted since Aug. 1. Each candidate must also provide evidence of having attained at least 50,000 unique donors to their campaign. And if they have the polls and donors, candidates will once again have to sign a pledge to support the party’s eventual 2024 nominee if they want to participate.
On Wednesday, Utah Sen. Mitt Romney announced he would not run for reelection in 2024. On the surface, the electoral impact of Romney’s decision is minimal — his seat should stay safely in Republican hands. But it’s still notable because it represents the departure of one of the few remaining Republican senators who had a moderate voting record and/or vocally opposed former President Donald Trump.
