Trump Surges ahead of DeSantis in Head-to-Head Poll after Indictment
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A new poll conducted after the indictment of Donald Trump found that in a head-to-head primary battle with Ron DeSantis, the former president leads the governor by 33 points, up from just 12 points back in January.
The McLaughlin & Associates poll of 1,000 likely primary voters published Monday was conducted in late March and early April, following news reports that Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg planned on indicting the former president for falsifying business records related to a hush-money payment made to a porn star ahead of the 2016 election. Trump will be arraigned on those charges at a courthouse in Manhattan Tuesday afternoon.
Among the full primary field, which includes declared candidates and likely Republican presidential hopefuls, Trump and DeSantis remain the two leading candidates, capturing 51 and 21 percent of respondents, respectively. Trump extended his lead over DeSantis by 18 points since the firm’s January survey of the full primary field.
In January, the pollsters also found a considerably tighter nomination race with Trump slightly edging out DeSantis 52 to 40 percent in a one-on-one primary ballot test.
Just over a third of respondents believe that Trump will get a fair trial in Manhattan, with 47 percent believing otherwise.
McLaughlin found that among the remaining 12 potential Republican nominees, Former vice-president Mike Pence garnered only 6 percent support and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley a scant 4 percent. No other candidate broke the 2 percent threshold.
The results were virtually identical to a Quinnipiac poll released in mid-March showing that long-shot candidates including former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson and tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy failed to even breach the 2 percent bar. National figures who have yet to announce their intentions to run, including Senator Ted Cruz (R., Tex.,) and Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, also struggled.
The Quinnipiac poll echoed McLaughlin’s findings that in a one-on-one contest for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, Trump would edge out DeSantis 51 to 40 percent amongst primary voters.
“DeSantis might be the buzz in the GOP conversation, but for now Trump is seeing no erosion and, in fact, enjoys a bump in his lead in the Republican primary,” Quinnipiac polling analyst Tim Malloy noted in an official statement following publication of the survey.
In a 2024 general election pitting Trump against President Joe Biden, the former president currently enjoys a four-point margin, a number that “is virtually unchanged from our March 2023 survey,” McLaughlin added.
The one bright spot for DeSantis appears to be his home state of Florida where a recent Mason-Dixon poll found the governor enjoys nearly a 60 percent approval rating and is considerably more popular than the former president.
