The Republican race in Iowa is coming down to the former President and the Florida Governor.
That’s the take of a Public Opinion Strategies poll conducted Sept. 5-6.
Public Opinion Strategies, an internal pollster for Ron DeSantis, sees Iowa as a “two-man race” between the Governor and Donald Trump, despite the numbers showing Trump leading DeSantis 45% to 22%.
“Moving into September, Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump’s positives are now identical. Vivek Ramaswamy’s image has taken on water since the first debate,” the one page memo accompanying the results reads.
Both Trump and DeSantis are at 73% approval among the 400 GOP caucus participants contacted by phone. Indeed, Ramaswamy is at just 54% according to this poll, well behind Trump, DeSantis, U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, who is at 69%, and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s 62%.
“This is a two-man race in Iowa. Now that the dust has settled after the first debate, Trump and DeSantis are the only two candidates with significant support — nobody else eclipses 6%. DeSantis saw a significant increase in his ballot standing since before the debate which has stabilized. Meanwhile, Haley, Ramaswamy and Scott have seen a decline in support,” the memo adds.
Beyond those metrics, the pollster argues the former President’s “floor” is collapsing, with “just 22% of voters say they are ‘only considering Trump’ compared to 26% after the first presidential debate. Nearly half (48%) of voters say they are ‘considering Trump and other candidates’ and another 29% say they are ‘not considering Trump.’”
The Governor has projected confidence regarding Iowa, of course, saying he is a “clear second under any metric,” an analysis seemingly rooted in this data.
“Everybody else is in single digits,” DeSantis said Wednesday on the Rubin Report. “I wouldn’t trade places with anyone in Iowa right now.”
The Governor made the case that he’s better positioned at this point in the race than previous Iowa caucus winners.
“We’ve actually had a huge amount of success in Iowa. I mean, if you look back at previous election cycles and find where the Iowa caucus winner was in the summer, people like Ted Cruz and Rick Santorum, they were polling at like 5 or 6%,” DeSantis related.
Santorum and Cruz did win Iowa, in 2012 and 2016 respectively, though both wins had caveats. Santorum won by the slimmest of margins in a race that had been seen effectively as a draw in 2012. In 2016, Trump deemed Cruz’s victory to be a fraud.
The Iowa result catapulted neither Santorum nor Cruz to the nomination, of course.
The post Internal poll says Iowa is a ‘two-man race’ between Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump appeared first on Florida Politics – Campaigns & Elections. Lobbying & Government..