U.S. Republican Party primary voters for the 2024 presidential election show strong interest in Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, even more favorably than former U.S. President Donald Trump, according to a poll by ‘The Wall Street Journal’.
In a hypothetical confrontation between DeSantis and Trump, the former would win with 52 percent of the votes against 38 percent of the support that the former president would receive.
The poll shows Trump leading among those who consider themselves «very conservative» and voters without a college education, while DeSantis is ahead among self-described «somewhat conservative» voters and those with at least a college degree.
Also, 86 percent of respondents say they have a favorable opinion of the Florida governor, while that number drops to 71 percent when talking about Trump.
The poll was released three weeks after a Harvard CAPS-Harris survey, shared exclusively with U.S. news portal The Hill, showed a negative trend in support for Trump, who had lost nine points of support in a matter of weeks.
That poll gave Trump 46 percent of the vote, compared to 28 percent of the vote for DeSantis, who has not yet made official a possible candidacy to run as the Republican candidate for the 2024 presidential elections.
Since the defeat of the Republicans in the Senate in the midterm elections, as well as after a much narrower than expected victory in the House of Representatives, there have been voices within the party that have questioned Trump’s leadership, claiming that there could be better candidates for the presidential elections than the former president himself.
Instead, DeSantis fared better than in the last election in the Florida gubernatorial race, comfortably outperforming his Democratic rival. This is the reason why many within the Republican Party have pointed him out as the person capable of facing Trump in the party’s primaries, a possibility that he has not ruled out.
