Arjun Singh
Among registered Republicans, more believe Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida should wield considerable influence over the party’s platform than former President Donald Trump, according to a new poll released on Monday.
When asked, 72% of respondents in the poll chose DeSantis as the politician who should have “a great deal or a good amount of influence on” the party’s political agenda, compared to 64% for Trump, according to Ipsos Research, which conducted the survey for ABC News.
In July and September, polls showed DeSantis defeating Trump in the New Hampshire Republican Primary and the Florida Republican Primary respectively. However, Trump leads DeSantis among Republicans nationwide in most polls, gaining an average of 50.8% support from them, according to RaceToWH.com, a 2024 primary polling aggregator; moreover, another Ipsos poll in August showed that four-out-of-five Republicans believe that Trump can win the next presidential election.
Neither Trump nor DeSantis have definitely said that they will seek the Republican nomination in 2024, though Trump has strongly hinted that he will do so in repeated public remarks, claiming on Sunday that he “will probably have to do it, again.” DeSantis, for his part, has claimed that he is focused on the ongoing Florida gubernatorial election, where he is running for re-election against former Gov. Charlie Crist, the Democratic candidate.
DeSantis’s popularity has skyrocketed among Republicans nationwide after the COVID-19 pandemic, where conservatives praised him for refusing to impose lockdowns after the spring of 2020, ordering the reopening of schools and rebuffing both mask and vaccination mandates. “We will never do any of these lockdowns, again,” he said.
The poll surveyed 618 registered voters and had a margin of error of 4.0%. Trump and DeSantis did not respond to a request for comment.
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