Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has slipped into third place behind former President Donald Trump and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy in a second national Republican primary presidential poll. A new Kaplan Strategies poll has Trump leading the Republican field – with a 37 percent margin over Ramaswamy, the next closest candidate in the primary contest.
2024 National Republican Primary
• Trump — 48% (+37)
• Ramaswamy — 11%
• DeSantis — 10%
• Pence — 8%
• Christie — 4%
• Haley — 4%
• Scott — 2%
• Burgum — 1%⦿ @dougjkaplan | Kaplan Strategies
⦿ n=800 LV | August 9-10 | ±3.5%https://t.co/JON42XQnkb pic.twitter.com/qVHT2ucnb2— InteractivePolls (@IAPolls2022) August 14, 2023
The Kaplan Strategies poll is the second poll in less than a week that shows the DeSantis campaign in decline. On August 10th, Cygnal, a Washington, DC based polling firm, showed former President Trump at a commanding 53 percent in a hypothetical national Republican primary. Ramaswamy was in second place with 11 percent and DeSantis in third at 10 percent.
The political analytics and poll aggregator website FiveThirtyEight shows a similar trend to the Kaplan and Cygnal polls (though in their polling average DeSantis still holds a narrow second place lead over Ramaswamy).
Since his glitchy May 24th presidential announcement on X (formerly Twitter), DeSantis has seen very little improvement in any polling. FiveThirtyEight, in fact, shows that since late-June, the DeSantis campaign has been on a steady decline while Trump has continued to capture over 50 percent of the Republican electorate.
DeSantis’s campaign isn’t just plagued by declining poll numbers. Federal Election Committee data shows that DeSantis had just 22 donors who gave over $200 in Iowa (as of early August). The lack of small dollar donors has put the DeSantis presidential campaign committee in a difficult financial spot, with a recent FEC letter indicating that the campaign committee may actually have far less than $6.6 million in cash-0n-hand they have reported.
The National Pulse has previously reported that 2024 general election polling has shifted to show Donald Trump now defeating Joe Biden – meanwhile Ron DeSantis would be defeated by the Democrat incumbent.