While roughly half of Republican voters prefer someone other than Donald Trump to be the party’s nominee in 2024, the former president would still best the party’s top five contenders, including Governor Ron DeSantis, in head-to-head matchups, according to a new poll.
Fifty-one percent of GOP primary voters would prefer an alternative to Trump, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll released Tuesday. A majority of primary voters under 35 years old, 64 percent, reported that they would not vote for Trump in a presidential primary. The college educated, a leading indicator of donor-class preferences, were similarly galvanized against Trump, with 65 percent vowing the same.
However, the poll suggests Trump would still secure the nomination in a hypothetical matchup against five other top GOP contenders, including DeSantis, Senator Ted Cruz, former vice president Mike Pence, former governor Nikki Haley, and former secretary of state Mike Pompeo. Trump garnered 49 percent support to DeSantis’s 25 percent, Cruz’s 7 percent, Pence’s 6 percent, Haley’s 6 percent, and Pompeo’s 2 percent, the survey shows.
Younger Republicans, those with a college degree, and those who said they voted for President Biden in 2020 all picked DeSantis as their favorite potential candidate. A political superstar in Florida, DeSantis is unique among rising GOP talent in refusing to commit to backing out of the 2024 race should Trump run.
Many Trump supporters recognize DeSantis’s likability, with 44 percent of respondents reporting that they had a very favorable opinion of the governor, compared to Trump’s 46 percent.
The poll comes amid the January 6 committee hearings, which have revealed further details about Trump’s alleged conduct during the Capitol riot. Those revelations — which include that Trump tried to accompany his armed supporters to the Capitol — in conjunction with Trump’s insistence on repeating his unsubstantiated claims about the 2020 elections, may finally be eating away at his support within the party. Nearly one-in-five respondents said Trump’s behavior “threatened American democracy,” though 75 percent said he was “just exercising his right to contest the election.”
The poll seemed to realize some Republican fears about Trump’s declining electability, showing him losing to Biden in a hypothetical rematch of the 2020 race with 41 percent to the president’s 44 percent. This projected outcome comes amid Biden’s extremely poor job performance, reflected in a different New York Times poll which found that 64 percent of Democrats don’t want Biden to be their 2024 nominee due to his old age and floundering on the economy and inflation.
The Never-Trump cohort plans to double-down on its opposition, the poll hinted, with 16 percent of Republicans promising to vote for Biden, a third-party candidate, or not at all if Trump is on the general ballot. Compared to 2020, the number of disaffected Republicans who are defiant about not voting for Trump increased seven percent, according to AP VoteCast, a large study of the 2020 electorate by NORC at the University of Chicago for The Associated Press.
Despite Trump’s faltering popularity within the GOP, he’s still remembered for presiding over an era of economic good fortune and stability in America, a stark contrast to current conditions under Biden of supply-chain crisis and towering inflation.
The poll included 849 registered voters nationwide and was conducted by telephone from July 5-7. The margin of error is plus or minus 4 percent.