Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has touted his gubernatorial record and widespread support in the Sunshine State as evidence of his presidential potential, but by any measure, another Florida man — former President Donald Trump — is far ahead in the Republican race.
Take the poll: A University of North Florida poll published Tuesday, on the eve of the third GOP debate in Miami, showed the 77-year-old Trump with a whopping 60% support among Republican primary voters.
DeSantis, 45, was a distant second with 21% — 39 percentage points behind. The Florida governor fared better in the head-to-head matchup — earning just 29% to Trump’s 59%.
And then there’s the endorsement: Thirteen of Florida’s 20 Republican members of the House of Representatives have publicly endorsed Trump, with GOP Sen. Rick Scott jumping on the bandwagon earlier this month — rejecting his successor as governor in the process.
DeSantis, meanwhile, has only one federal lawmaker from Florida on his side: Congresswoman Laurel Lee.
DeSantis campaign spokesman Andrew Romeo told The Post this week that he believes “the poll is wrong” and he doesn’t think “it’s indicative of what’s going to happen in this race.”
DeSantis’ team has maintained the Republican primary is a “two-person race” between Trump and DeSantis, and the Florida governor is the only candidate who can defeat the former president. The governor is now focusing most of his efforts on Iowa in hopes of restoring an equally large deficit there and riding that momentum through the remaining early states.
Ron DeSantis speaks during the Florida Freedom Summit at the Gaylord Palms Resort on November 04, 2023 in Kissimmee, Florida.Getty Images
Florida doesn’t hold a primary until March 19, more than two months after the Iowa caucuses and two weeks after Super Tuesday.
“The reality is that when we get to Florida, we’ll have a lot of good results under our belts. We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves,” added Romeo. “We think we’ll do really well in Florida, but first we have to battle it out in Iowa.”
Although DeSantis’ support is notably lacking among Republicans in Washington, the governor has received the endorsements of more than 90 officials in his home state.
Donald Trump gestures during a campaign rally at Ted Hendricks Stadium in Hialeah, Florida.REUTERS
“For the incumbent president to not be able to attract more than that is a shame for him,” Romeo said. “It just goes to show that Ron DeSantis actually has a lot of power in Florida.”
DeSantis won re-election last year by nearly 20 percentage points, the largest margin of victory for a Republican gubernatorial candidate since Reconstruction.
But so far, Florida’s 2024 Republican race is on a path that resembles the 2016 primary, when Trump defeated native Marco Rubio by 18 percentage points, ending the Florida senator’s own White House hopes.
DeSantis won his gubernatorial re-election in Florida by nearly 20 points.Getty Images
“I don’t know if anyone can at this point,” said Michael Binder, faculty director of the Public Opinion Research Lab at UNF, which released the latest survey. “It really doesn’t look good for any of the other Republican candidates. Donald Trump has a vise grip on the base of the Republican Party that emerges for the main thesis.”
Armando Ibarra, president of the Miami Young Republicans, sounded more optimistic about DeSantis, noting that neither candidate has devoted a significant amount of resources to Florida and “many voters are not paying full attention to this primary process.”
“As we get closer to the vote here in Florida and the campaigns shift their focus to the state, I think we’re definitely going to see a shift in the polls,” Ibarra told The Post.
Once a true battleground state, Florida has trended solidly Republican in recent years. Bill Nelson is the most recent Democrat elected to the Senate, in 2012. The last Democratic governor elected was Lawton Chiles, in 1994.
Last year, DeSantis became the first Republican gubernatorial candidate since Jeb Bush in 2002 to win Miami-Dade County, a task many observers considered impossible before the race.
The shift to the right was driven largely by the state’s Hispanic voters, who approved Trump based on his hardline stance against left-wing totalitarian regimes in Cuba and Venezuela.
However, Ibarra added, “Governor DeSantis is also well-liked” in the community because of his gubernatorial record — particularly his response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
While DeSantis remains popular in Florida, the nature of Trump’s campaign is also “bending a lot of things that we’re used to in presidential politics,” GOP strategist Dave Wilson told The Post.
“He has a natural following of people who want 2016 Trump policies,” he said. “They don’t like what they got with Joe Biden in 2020, and so there’s a natural tendency to go back to what we know and they see him as a more viable competitor to Biden than DeSantis.”
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
