RUTHFULLY YOURS

With twelve months to go until New Hampshire’s 2024 Republican presidential primary, Florida governor Ron DeSantis leads Donald Trump by twelve points — 42 percent to 30 percent — in a new Granite State poll.

The survey, conducted by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center from January 19 to 23 and released on Thursday, is the first independent poll of the first-in-the-nation 2024 GOP primary conducted since the 2022 midterm elections, in which DeSantis scored a resounding 19-point reelection victory in Florida while Trump-backed Senate candidates underperformed and cost the GOP control of the upper chamber.

The new poll shows DeSantis’s vote share improving by three points since the University of New Hampshire last conducted a survey in the summer of 2022, while Trump’s vote share dropped seven points from 37 percent to 30 percent. Trump’s vote share has declined in each of the four polls conducted by the pollster since June of 2021.

Not only is DeSantis leading in the early poll, he also appears to have the most room to grow his support. “When asked for their second choice, 30% of likely Republican primary voters support DeSantis, 19% support Sununu, 14% support Trump, 7% support Texas Senator Ted Cruz, 6% support former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and 5% support Haley,” reports the UNH Survey Center.

The early consolidation behind DeSantis in New Hampshire marks a striking contrast to the polls of 2016. In that race, Trump jumped out to an early lead in New Hampshire that he never lost, and the Granite State played a key role in propelling him to the GOP nomination after he’d lost Iowa to Ted Cruz. Trump took only 35 percent of the vote in the state’s primary but still cruised to a 20-point victory because the rest of the field was fractured. (Four candidates — Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, and John Kasich — each took between 10.5 percent and 15.8 percent of the vote.)

Yes, it’s just one poll a year away from the primary, but in the 2024 UNH poll only DeSantis and Trump are registering in the double digits. Former South Carolina governor and U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley comes in third at 8 percent, while three candidates — New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu, former Maryland governor Larry Hogan, and former Wyoming representative Liz Cheney — are tied for fourth with 4 percent each. Combined, this second tier of candidates, which might be described as non-Trump (Sununu and Haley) and anti-Trump (Hogan and Cheney), still accounts for 20 percent of likely New Hampshire voters in the poll.

There are three other key takeaways from the poll.

First, it shows why other potential 2024 candidates and their backers — from Sununu to the staff of South Dakota governor Kristi Noem — are taking shots at DeSantis as though he is the front-runner, even though Trump is the front-runner in national polls.

Second, the poll is a vindication of those who worry that a big, divided field could yet again help hand Trump the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. At the present moment, the potential candidates in the single digits have better odds of bleeding support from Trump’s main competition and helping Trump win than they do of actually overtaking Trump.

And finally, the poll suggests it’s unwise for DeSantis to pursue the nomination as though his only objective is to out-Trump Trump. Yes, he’s made a lot of political hay from picking fights with the Left and the mainstream media so far. But if the second tier of candidates in New Hampshire is composed almost entirely of non-Trump and anti-Trump candidates, DeSantis has to worry about losing support to one or more of them by picking the wrong fights. Pundits can warn potential candidates (and voters) that those with little hope of victory might only help Trump by running. But any candidate who thinks he or she has even a 1 percent chance of becoming president will probably run for the job. And it is DeSantis’s own words and actions more than anything else that will determine whether he can keep building his coalition to win the nomination.