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Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has received another helping of bad news amid a scramble to reverse his campaign's meteoric drop in national polls for the 2024 Republican nomination.
A top Republican pollster released results on Thursday showing that Florida's Republican governor has slipped to third place in the Republican field behind businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, a grim milestone for a candidate many once considered the best option to unseat former President Donald Trump at the top of the field.
Per a survey of 2,000 voters nationwide, the Republican-leaning pollster Cygnal—which holds an 'A' rating with poll aggregator FiveThirtyEight—DeSantis is now the preferred option of just 10 percent of the electorate, and is running virtually neck-and-neck with Ramaswamy (11 percent).
Trump, meanwhile, remains the clear leader of the Republican field, holding steady as the top pick of 53 percent of the GOP base.
"Vivek started this campaign with zero name ID and didn't even register in most polls," Tricia McLaughlin, the Ramaswamy campaign's communications director, told Newsweek. "He's just getting warmed up."
The poll's findings come with a number of caveats. Cygnal pollster Brock McCleary (who was not involved in the Thursday poll) is also Ramaswamy's pollster, which the firm noted in the press release.
"This primary is a two-man race between Governor DeSantis and a man running in 2024 on the things he promised to do in 2016 and failed to do," a spokesperson for the DeSantis campaign told Newsweek. "Governor DeSantis is the only candidate in the race who can beat Joe Biden and implement the agenda we need to reverse this country's decline and revive its future."
The survey also has some significant deviations from national polling on abortion, claiming that 56 percent of the country's voters—including a plurality of Democrats—favor a ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. For comparison, an AP-NORC poll from late July found that 51 percent of the country believes abortion should be legal up to 15 weeks of pregnancy, including three-quarters of Democrats.
Still, the poll represents yet another data point in a trend for the DeSantis campaign: Things are going downhill fast.
"We've seen on social media a little bit of outrage that this is somehow an internal poll that is now being leaked to shift the conversation, but I can assure you that's not the case," Cygnal's Chris Lane, who oversaw the survey, told Newsweek. "As far as DeSantis is concerned, we've seen this trend over the last six months.
"At one point there, a Trump-DeSantis head-to-head matchup was nearly tied, and slowly but surely we've seen people who have been supportive of both the president and Ron DeSantis move back toward the former president, and that coalition who would rally behind the governor sort of dissipate."
It's not the first poll in which DeSantis has fallen to third place. A July 24 poll from Fox Business showed DeSantis behind former U.N. Ambassador and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley in the Palmetto State. But nationally, DeSantis' old momentum has withered.
As of Thursday, FiveThirtyEight averages show DeSantis sitting at just 14 percent in national polls, a number well below the 23 percent he had on June 1 and much lower than where he stood at the year's start, when he and Trump were virtually tied in early polls.
Trump, meanwhile, has continued to surge in the polls—even as his campaign coffers have faltered while he battles nearly 80 criminal charges in three jurisdictions. A fourth indictment could also come down in Fulton County, Georgia, for allegedly using his power to coax state election officials into changing the result of his losing effort in the state during the 2020 election.
The Thursday poll by no means shows DeSantis as unviable. Fellow Republican candidate Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor who polls poorly nationwide, has gained significant ground in early states like New Hampshire as he has focused his attention there, while Ramaswamy's surge in national polling comes as he has adopted a more national posture.
Recent weeks in the DeSantis campaign, meanwhile, have been defined by upheaval amid reports of campaign overspending, significant staff turnover and a culture-war-focused platform that polling shows is starting to fall flat with voters—something Lane's polling has identified within the Republican electorate as well.
"Inflation and the economy is the number one issue for Republicans," Lane said. "Forty-three percent of Republicans have that as their top issue. Second is illegal immigration, 24 percent. Nothing else clips 10 percent."
DeSantis, meanwhile, has sought to moderate his message—particularly as some top donors have reportedly threatened to defect over his more extreme positions on issues like abortion.
Once known for his combative relationship with the press, the Florida governor has begun to court mainstream news outlets he once shunned—recently appearing for a Sunday sit-down with NBC News—and has begun to lodge more pointed criticisms at Trump over his disproven belief that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
Update 8/11/23, 3:43 p.m. ET: This story was updated with comment from the Ramaswamy and DeSantis campaigns.
About the writer
Nick Reynolds is a senior politics reporter at Newsweek. A native of Central New York, he previously worked as a ... Read more