Donald Trump has consolidated the support of slightly above half of his party at this early stage of the race for the Republican nomination, a newly released poll conducted by SSRS finds, highlighting the former president’s potential path to a third nomination – and the challenges his rivals will face over the next months in establishing their own bases of support.
The Republican field remains far from settled. In the days since the poll was conducted, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott declared his candidacy, with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis also set to announce his bid for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination Wednesday night in a conversation with Twitter owner Elon Musk.
Trump is the first choice of 53% Republican and Republican-leaning voters in the primary, roughly doubling DeSantis’ 26%. But the survey also finds that wide swaths of Republican-aligned voters are willing to consider either of the two, as well as several other candidates. More than 8 in 10 either support or say they’re open to considering Trump (84%) and DeSantis (85%), and smaller majorities say they support or would consider former UN ambassador Nikki Haley (61%), Scott (60%) and former Vice President Mike Pence (54%). Haley and Pence are currently the first choice of 6%, according to the poll, with Scott at 2% along with former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, and five other candidates hold 1% support or less.
The survey also finds that most of the possible electorate has already ruled out a few names in the primary. Sixty percent say they would not support Christie for the nomination under any circumstances, and 55% say they’d never support former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson or New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, respectively.
Trump’s substantial advantage in first-choice support over DeSantis marks a shift from CNN’s March polling, which found the two men roughly neck-and-neck. That movement in Trump’s favor mirrors the findings of other recent national polling on the race.
Trump now leads DeSantis by similar margins among both older and younger voters, an apparent shift from March, when his backing was substantially weaker among those older than 45 than it was among younger Republican-aligned voters. The former president’s primary support now falls short of a majority among some relatively small blocs of Republican and Republican-leaning voters – among them, those who say President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory was legitimate (27% of whom support him), White college graduates (38%), self-described moderates or liberals (45%), and independents who lean toward the GOP (43%). But voters in those groups have yet to unite more strongly around any alternative either, with DeSantis below the 30% mark with each group and other candidates still further behind.
DeSantis’ best showing comes among self-proclaimed “very conservative” voters, 34% of whom support him, compared with 23% of those who describe themselves as “somewhat conservative.”
Roughly half of Republican and Republican-leaning voters, 52%, think it’s highly likely that Trump will win the party’s presidential nomination for a third cycle, with another 35% saying it’s somewhat likely, and just 13% saying it’s not too likely or not likely at all. His supporters are far more likely to express confidence in his chances: 71% of those who call Trump their first choice in the primary say it’s at least very likely he’ll win, compared with only 30% of those who do not currently support him.
GOP-aligned voters mostly say th
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