Former President Donald Trump increased his substantial lead over Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in the latest Marquette Law School Poll.
While DeSantis has seen his support erode among Republican voters, he again fares slightly better than Trump in a head-to-head match-up with President Joe Biden, according to the survey.
The Milwaukee-based law school’s poll shows Trump with 46 percent support among registered Republicans and independents who lean Republicans. That’s the same as Marquette’s national poll in May, but up 6 percentage points from March, when the former president garnered 40 percent support.
DeSantis, remains Trump’s closest competitor, but his numbers continue to slip — as they have in other national and state polls.
The Florida governor is backed by 22 percent of registered Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, down 3 points from Marquette’s survey in May. DeSantis is down a whopping 13 percentage points since March, when he was polling at 35 percent, within 5 points of Trump.
“Trump rose March to May, but was steady in July. DeSantis slipped in each poll since March,” said Marquette Law School pollster Charles Franklin. “The lackluster DeSantis campaign launch has hurt him but so has Trump criticism. That said, DeSantis is still pretty well liked in GOP, his best basis for a recovery.”
DeSantis holds a 3 percentage point lead over Biden in a hypothetical match-up. Registered voters preferred DeSantis to the incumbent 51 percent to 48 percent.
For a Biden-Trump rematch, voters are evenly divided, with each candidate receiving 50 percent support.
As the poll notes, no other contestant in the crowded field of Republican presidential hopefuls is close. Former Vice President Mike Pence is in a distant 3rd place, polling at 7 percent, followed by former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley (6 percent), U.S. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina (4 percent), and the rest at 1 percent or less.
The Marquette Law School Poll, released Thursday, is a bit dated, however. It was conducted July 7-12, according to a press release. More than 1,000 adults nationwide were interviewed for the survey, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percent. The margin of error is plus or minus 5.8 percent and plus or minus 6.7 percent for registered Republican and Democratic voters, respectively.
Franklin told The Wisconsin Daily Star that the field period was scheduled to run later but the polling work was finished sooner than expected. Pollsters stuck with the originally scheduled release date.
“Opinion can always move but we are not seeing movement in others polls since our field ended so I’m not concerned,” Franklin said in an email response.
The Marquette Law School poll is a bit of an outlier of sorts from surveys of more recent vintage. Many of those polls show Ohio biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy inching up in support. The RealClearPolitics average of national polls shows Ramaswamy running in 3rd place, at 5.4 percent. Pence is just behind at 5.2 percent.
In the latest Economist/YouGov poll out this week, Trump’s margin was even bigger. According to that poll, 55 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents support the former president. DeSantis has the backing of 18 percent, with Ramaswamy at 5 percent. Pence, Haley, and Scott are each running at 3 percent.
“Pence has bounced around from 5 to 2 to 7 this time,” Franklin said of the Marquette poll numbers between March and July. “We also see Haley and Scott picking up a little. I expect it is those who don’t pick Trump looking for alternatives and trying these out as alternatives to DeSantis.”
The combatants will have a chance to woo Iowa voters under one roof on Friday at the Republican Party of Iowa’s annual Lincoln Dinner fundraiser. All of the GOP presidential candidates, with the exception of former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, will be in attendance at the event of the summer in the kickoff caucus state.
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M.D. Kittle is the National Political Editor for The Star News Network.
Photo “Ron DeSantis” by Ron DeSantis.
