A new Monmouth poll of the national Republican primary is gaining attention. While for understandable reasons most of the focus has been on the swing toward Donald Trump, what I’m paying more attention to is the difference between Ron DeSantis and the third-place contender who, as in other polls, isn’t close.
It should be noted that the numbers cited by Cohn were the results when respondents weren’t given a list of candidates. When given a list of candidates, it was a bit tighter: Trump at 44 percent, DeSantis at 36 percent, Pence at 7 percent, and Haley at 6 percent. Either way, at this stage of the race, national primary polls predict virtually nothing about the outcome of a nomination that will be decided next year on a state-by-state basis. But they can tell us something about the broad contours of the race, and they can affect the decisions of candidates considering whether to enter and donors deciding where to park their money.
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