2024 GOP Primary Update: Trump and Haley Get Good News, DeSantis and Ramaswamy Not So Much
A new Fox News poll on the 2024 GOP primary race has shed some fascinating new light on the state of the race as the country moves ever-closer to primary season proper.
According to the poll, which ran from Oct. 6 – 9 and polled Republican primary voters (with a margin of error of 4.5 percent), the top of the pecking order remains unchanged.
Former President Donald Trump has long held a commanding and decisive lead over his contemporaries in the primary race and that remains true in this new Fox News poll.
Trump is currently polling at 59 percent in this poll.
If Trump were to glean anything negative from this poll, it would be the fact that he was polling at 60 percent in the same poll that was conducted in September.
A percentage point is hardly insignificant, given that it can be the difference between winning and losing an election, and that might press more heavily on the minds of Team Trump if the former president wasn’t so far ahead of his second-closest competitor.
It’s that mantle for “second-closest competitor” that appears to have seen the biggest shake-up in this latest poll.
Both anecdotally and polling-wise, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has long been regarded as the most serious challenge to Trump’s path to a primary victory.
The Fox News poll largely keeps to that accepted wisdom, with DeSantis polling at 13 percent — a marked 46 percent deficit compared to Trump, but in second place, nonetheless.
Of note, DeSantis polled at 13 percent in September, as well.
But nipping at DeSantis’ heels all of a sudden? Former South Carolina Gov. Nimarata Nikki Haley.
Haley was polling at a meager five percent in September, but has doubled that number to 10 percent in the span of a month.
Fox News attributes that boost in part “to two well-regarded performances in the first two Republican presidential debates.”
(At the very least, the second GOP primary debate gave Haley a derisive new nickname — which she quickly seized on.)
And while DeSantis holds a healthy lead over Haley in most key polls, Fox News notes that surveys in key early primary battleground states are tilting in Haley’s favor over the Florida governor’s.
Haley reportedly holds leads over DeSantis in surveys in both New Hampshire (which votes second in the primary) and South Carolina (which votes fourth.)
Those surveys buck conventional wisdom that DeSantis was a shoo-in to finish no worse than second in the GOP primary.
Haley’s emergence also puts a damper on political upstart Vivek Ramaswamy’s quest to secure the presidential nomination, as it seemed at one point that Ramaswamy was set to overtake DeSantis.
Instead, Ramasawamy joins Trump and Tim Scott as the only GOP primary candidates who lost some footing in this Fox News poll from September to October.
But while Trump lost just a percentage point, Ramaswamy fell four percent points (from 11 percent to seven), and Scott fell two (from three percent to one.)
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie gained slightly, going from 2 percent in September to 3 percent in October.
All of this polling will come to a head when the GOP primary begins in earnest with the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 15, 2024.
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