Trump would easily beat DeSantis in the Republican primary, a new Harvard poll shows

Former President Donald Trump would easily overcome the challenge of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in a Republican primary, a new poll shows.

The poll, by Harvard CAPS-Harris and published by The Hill, shows just under half of Republican voters would favor Trump in the primary.

The former host of The Apprentice would have 48 percent of the vote, giving him a 20-point lead over DeSantis, considered by many to be the rising star of the Republican Party.

Trump’s polling numbers have also risen 3 percent in the past month, despite him facing a slew of investigations and questions about why the candidates he supported in the midterms failed against his Democratic rivals.

Also left in the poll were former Trump Vice President Mike Pence, who got 7 percent, while Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and former UN ambassador Nikki Haley got just 3 percent, respectively.

The Harvard CAPS-Harris poll, published by The Hill, shows just under half of Republican voters would favor Trump in the primary.

Polls late last year showed DeSantis was eating away at Trump’s popularity, that surge appears to have fizzled out.

speaking to The hill, poll co-director Mark Penn said: ‘Trump has gotten a little stronger, but Ron DeSantis continues to get stronger too. Trump is ahead, but he already has all the votes he can get: DeSantis is the potential candidate.”

The poll surveyed 2,050 registered voters from across the United States between January 18 and 19.

The Harvard survey echoed the results of a morning consultation poll released earlier this week that also gave Trump 48 percent of the vote. That poll polled 3,763 likely Republican primary voters.

In that poll, Trump led DeSantis by a healthy 17 points.

These findings come after several polls suggested that DeSantis could overtake Trump as the Republican favorite, although it’s still too early to tell.

According to most similar polls, Trump and DeSantis are the top two favorites at this point in the election cycle. No other candidate manages to break 10 percent.

Although the Florida governor has not explicitly shared his interest in running for the White House in 2024, his refusal to rule out a possible challenge to Trump in the primary has infuriated the former president.

Late last year, polls showed DeSantis was eating away at Trump’s popularity in the polls, in the wake of the former twice-indicted president’s dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Kanye West and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.

Former Vice President Pence ranked third in the poll, but still failed to break double digits.

Former South Carolina governor and Trump’s UN ambassador Nikki Haley has signaled that she can throw her hat into the ring by 2024.

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida was handily defeated by Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican primary

A poll from earlier this month published by Morning Consult showed similar results to the recent Harvard poll.

A USA Today/Suffolk University poll of the same time period gave Trump a favorable rating among Republican voters of 64 percent, up from 75 percent in October 2022.

a january CBS News Poll found that a whopping 81 percent of Republican voters wanted to vote for candidates who were in a similar mold to Trump.

While 35 percent said it was “very important” that their representatives at the local level and in Washington align with the former president.

A combined 65 percent of those surveyed say loyalty to Trump is very or somewhat important, while just 14 percent said it was “not important at all” and 21 percent said it was “not too important” to them. them.

The results are similar to the same poll conducted last year, showing very little reassessment by the Republican Party and how they feel about Trump as party leader.

In a separate poll this month, conducted by WPA Intelligence, it was found that DeSantis would handily defeat incumbent Joe Biden if the election were held in January 2023.

In a lavish ceremony in the ballroom of his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on November 15, Trump announced that he was running for a third shot at the White House.

But the campaign got off to a somewhat slow start with relatively little fanfare, compared to the stir he caused in 2016 as an outside candidate and his bombastic case for re-election from the White House pulpit in 2020.

He will finally hold his first official 2024 campaign event later this month, more than two months after submitting the paperwork to run.

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden’s public approval rating was near the lowest level of his presidency this week amid criticism from Republicans over classified documents found at his home in recent months, according to a new Reuters poll. /ipsos.

The three-day national poll, which closed on Sunday, showed 40 percent of Americans approved of Biden’s performance as president, up from 39 percent in a Reuters/Ipsos poll a month earlier.

Biden began 2023 buoyed by unexpectedly strong midterm election results for Democrats. US inflation was also falling and the Republican Party seemed in disarray after taking days to choose a speaker for the US House of Representatives.

But the latest polling numbers suggest those factors may not have significantly changed public opinion of the president as he prepares for an expected 2024 re-election bid.