Campaigning in the Golden State may be fool’s gold for Florida’s Governor if a new Emerson College Poll putting him over 50 points behind the front-runner means anything.
“Former President Donald Trump leads the Republican Primary,” the pollsters announced Friday. “63% support the former President, 11% support Ron DeSantis, 5% support Nikki Haley, and 4% Chris Christie. Eleven percent are undecided.”
Emerson’s poll of 331 Republican voters in California, conducted Nov. 11-14, tracks with other surveys showing DeSantis getting drubbed by Trump. That’s meaningful given that if the former President receives a majority of votes as he has in all recent polls, he will sweep the state’s 169 delegates.
DeSantis had 12% support in the most recent University of California Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies survey. He had the same level of support in the latest Public Policy Institute of California poll.
The Governor was in California earlier this fall for a presidential debate, where he also made some other news, including being condemned by the Salinas City Council ahead of a fundraising event in the city.
On a trip to the Port of Long Beach, DeSantis was flanked by truck drivers as he made the case that California is the “petri dish of leftism” in the country. If elected President, he vowed to “take action” against California’s “electric mandates for big rigs.”
He spoke to the California Republican Convention, where he rehashed familiar gripes against the University of Florida’s football team, saying it could do a “little bit better” on the field.
DeSantis also appeared on Bill Maher’s HBO program, an appearance more notable for what the longtime comedian and talk show host said than anything else.
“If your campaign was going well, you wouldn’t be on this show,” Maher quipped, a seeming reference to the Governor’s penchant for friendly interviewers in recent years.
DeSantis has also used California as a public safety punching bag on the trail, both in the state and outside of it.
“When people are telling me that when they go shopping, they take off their jewelry because they don’t want to get mugged, even in nice places in L.A., that’s a huge, huge problem,” DeSantis said in Long Beach.
“I was just in San Francisco. I saw — in 20 minutes on the ground — people defecating on the sidewalk. I saw people using fentanyl. I saw people smoking crack right there in the open, right there on the street. It was a civilization in decay,” the Governor said at a Faith & Freedom Coalition event in June.
While at a Never Back Down bus tour stop in Iowa, the Governor said his presidential administration would not “let California regulate how farmers in Iowa conduct their business on things like, you know, these pork producers have to follow California law to do this stuff.”
“It doesn’t even make any sense,” DeSantis said.
Earlier this year, in a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of a California law called Proposition 12, which mandates more room for breeding pigs. The court sided with the state against the National Pork Producers Council and the American Farm Bureau Federation, industry groups that contended California law would impose unreasonable burdens on pig farmers.
Florida has similar protections in its Constitution, it should be noted.
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