The 2024 race for the Republican presidential nomination appears to be Donald Trump’s race to lose, even in the home states of his prominent GOP rivals.
A new poll of likely Republican voters in Florida found 60% support the former president in the 2024 presidential primary. The state’s current governor, Ron DeSantis, finds himself in a distant second at just 21% ahead of a debate in Miami on Wednesday, according to the University of North Florida’s Public Opinion Research Lab.
“Despite historically high approval in the polls, Governor DeSantis losing steam in his home state doesn’t bode well for his national campaign,” the lab’s faculty director Dr. Michael Binder said in a statement. “Even if you wipe out the rest of the competition in a head-to-head, Trump leads DeSantis by 20 points.”
The polling comes a day before DeSantis will take to the stage in Miami for a third debate with his fellow 2024 contenders, minus Trump. The race’s frontrunner will instead skip the debate, as he’s done twice already, and hold a rally in Hialeah, Florida. Why debate, Trump has argued, when he is so far ahead.
“Thank you Florida—I love you too!” Trump wrote on social media on Tuesday, responding to the poll.
Only two other candidates garnered more than 1% support: former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley at 6% and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie at 2%.
“Ron is flailing like a wounded bird falling from the sky,” Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement on Monday, attacking DeSantis and Haley. “When you have two people fighting over first-loser status, it goes to show how pathetic their station in life really is."
The poll of 788 registered Republican voters who voted in primaries in 2022, 2020 and 2016 also asked respondents who they would pick in a head-to-head matchup between Trump and DeSantis. In that hypothetical race, Floridian Republicans picked Trump over DeSantis by a 30 percentage point margin.
“I know most of the candidates running for president, and I respect their decision to put themselves through this very difficult process,” wrote Florida Sen. Rick Scott, a fellow Republican and DeSantis’ predecessor as governor, in a Newsweek op-ed titled “It's Time To Unite Behind Donald Trump.”
“Make no mistake: every single one of them would be a better president than Joe Biden,” Scott continued. “But Republican voters are making their voices heard loud and clear. They want to return to the leadership of Donald Trump.”
The sparse public polling in Florida has shown DeSantis drop to a primary-low from a 20 to 30 percentage point lead over Trump last fall. His campaign has failed to capitalize early enthusiasm for his candidacy and consolidate voters who would prefer someone other than Trump. Instead, the former president has consolidated a majority of primary support nationally and sizable pluralities in key early primary states, while far out fundraising the Florida governor.
On Saturday at a Florida GOP event, Trump welcomed seven state lawmakers onto the stage during his speech who were announcing their endorsements of him. Five previously endorsed DeSantis. Behind them on stage, giant text read “Florida is Trump country.”
Trump bragged, as he often has, that his endorsement of DeSantis during his first gubernatorial run in 2018 got the backbench congressman elected. In Florida, Trump mockingly imitated DeSantis begging him for his endorsement, a characterization that has been disputed by DeSantis and others.
“We hit him hard and now he’s like a wounded falling bird from the sky,” Trump said before slamming DeSantis for running against him. “I said to the people ‘it’s so disloyal, I don’t think voters are going to like that.’ And my people said ‘they don’t care, sir, they don’t care about loyalty.’ I said ‘I think they do care about loyalty’ and I was right, they do care.”
One factor University of North Florida researchers believe contributes to his popularity is a vast majority of Republican voters’ belief that Trump did nothing wrong in his pursuit to overturn the 2020 presidential election — actions that have resulted in two criminal prosecutions: a racketeering case in Georgia and a federal conspiracy case in Washington.
According to the poll, 71% of GOP voters in Florida believe Trump was “just exercising his right to contest the election.” Only 16% said their view was that “he went so far that he threatened American democracy.”
“Given the support for Trump in the upcoming election, it’s not surprising that most of these voters think he was within his rights to contest the election,” Binder said. “Interestingly, the 16% who think he threatened democracy tend to favor DeSantis narrowly over Nikki Haley.”
Florida is not the only state where Trump is dominating the competition despite their connections to the state. Haley, a former governor of South Carolina trails Trump by 30 percentage points there and the senator she once appointed, Tim Scott, is in a distant fourth at 6.5%, according to a polling average by FiveThirtyEight.
“We have to start being a strong and proud America again. We did it starting in South Carolina. We're going to finish it at the Oval Office,” Haley pledged last week after filing for the primary in her home state.
Despite Trump’s consistent and growing lead in polling, DeSantis too presented an optimistic front at the Florida GOP event over the weekend.
“There’s going to be a lot that happens in this country over the next weeks and months, but I’ll tell you this, I will get the job done as your nominee. We’ll not only win the presidency, we’ll win the Congress, we’ll win the Senate, we’ll win state legislatures and school boards just like we did in Florida,” DeSantis said. “Florida is the model. We know how to get it done.”