In a few weeks, Florida governor Ron DeSantis will almost certainly be celebrating a comfortable reelection victory. But there won’t be much time to bask in it before speculation about his 2024 plans, and a possible matchup against Donald Trump, goes into overdrive.
Having covered many presidential primary races, I’ve learned to largely discount national polling taken way in advance of voting in early primary states, and so I don’t want to read much into the headline number in the latest NYT/Siena poll showing Trump beating DeSantis 47–28 in a hypothetical race. But such polling can sometimes raise interesting questions, and Josh Kraushaar of Axios flags one such finding of the poll, which is that DeSantis narrowly leads Trump among Republican college graduates 36 percent to 33 percent, but gets clobbered among those who do not have a college degree, with 55 percent supporting Trump and just 23 percent supporting DeSantis. I dug a bit more into the crosstabs myself, and they show a similar regional divide, with DeSantis close to Trump among suburban voters (trailing 40–36), but way behind among rural voters (53–24).
Obviously, we have no clue how those numbers might change if the two candidates start duking it out a year from now. Megyn Kelly, in a recent conversation with Dave Rubin, made the case that nobody, not even DeSantis, stands a chance against Trump. Her argument essentially boiled down to the fact that Trump has too large a base of loyal followers to be beaten in a Republican primary. If she’s proven correct, I imagine that part of the answer will be in the numbers discussed above.
DeSantis is clearly a very popular Republican and clever politician who has made a name for himself on a number of issues that are a high priority for conservatives. But going up against Trump, and doing so in states such as Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, is a much different proposition. DeSantis carries the risk in a primary of having a similar problem to the one faced by Elizabeth Warren, who appealed to a lot of well-educated progressives as well as liberal journalists but didn’t really connect beyond that. DeSantis is more skilled than Warren, of course, but Trump is also more formidable among Republicans than anybody Warren faced. There is certainly the possibility that DeSantis becomes a favorite of white-collar Republicans and professional conservatives looking to move on from Trump, but that rural voters say, “not so fast!”