More bad polling news for Trump

And some reasons to think the news might get worse for him

Tonight, Donald Trump is expected to announce his candidacy for president. The announcement comes at a time when Trump is slipping badly in the polls.

I wrote about the first evidence of major slippage — a YouGov poll — here. That survey was conducted after the midterms and mostly before Trump raged against Ron DeSantis. (In the week leading up to the midterms, a Morning Consult poll found Trump leading DeSantis by a healthy, albeit diminishing, margin.)

Now, there’s more bad news for Trump. It comes from Florida, Georgia, New Hampshire, Iowa, and Texas. Polling in the first four states was conducted for the Club for Growth. In all five states, DeSantis leads Trump comfortably.

The leads for DeSantis in Florida and Georgia aren’t surprising. DeSantis is immensely popular in his home state, and it was obvious from this year’s GOP primaries in Georgia (if not before) that Trump has worn out his welcome there.

Even so, it’s worth pointing to the margins in both state polls. DeSantis leads Trump by 26 points in Florida and by 20 in Georgia.

It’s also worth remembering that Trump crushed Florida’s then-“favorite son” Marco Rubio in Florida in 2016. Rubio was not as popular in Florida as DeSantis is now, but it still seems clear that, at least in Florida and Georgia, Trump is a shadow of his 2016 self.

Iowa and New Hampshire represent a better test of Trump-DeSantis standing. They will be the first states heard from in 2024, and neither potential candidate has any special connection to either state.

According to the Club for Growth polling, DeSantis leads Trump by 11 points in Iowa and 15 points in New Hampshire. It was the Granite State that gave Trump his first big win in 2016.

Club for Growth is now anti-Trump. Some may suspect that its polling is skewed against the former president. Maybe, maybe not. The Club for Growth was anti-Trump in August. At that time, its pollster found Trump leading DeSantis in Iowa and the two tied in New Hampshire.

Furthermore, a Texas poll that was not conducted for Club for Growth finds DeSantis leading Trump, 43-32. (That poll did not limit the alternatives to DeSantis and Trump, but between them Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo, and Tim Scott collected only 11 percent of the support.)

Trump’s announcement might help revive his fortunes. But if his recent attacks on DeSantis provide any guidance, his campaigning might “unrevive” them.

This might be true for at least three reasons. First, if Trump’s attacks on potential opponents like DeSantis and Glenn Youngkin continue in the same I-made-you-I can-break-you vein, he will look increasingly bitter and mired in the past. That’s not a good look.

Second, the more Trump reminds voters that he endorsed DeSantis and Youngkin, the more he signals to pro-Trump voters that these candidates are compatible with Trumpism, minus its leaders narcissism. (As John Sexton points our, the Texas survey already shows considerably acceptance of DeSantis among pro-Trump voters.) And if Trump says his endorsements were a mistake, he detracts further from the notion that his judgment is sound — a view that’s already hard enough to reconcile with his 2022 endorsements.

Third, and little noticed I think, is the one substantive issue Trump has chosen (so far) to attack DeSantis on. That issue is the response to covid.

In his attack on DeSantis, Trump described the Florida Governor “as an average REPUBLICAN Governor with great Public Relations, who didn’t have to close up his State, but did, unlike other Republican Governors, whose overall numbers for a Republican, were just average — middle of the pack — including COVID.”

Let’s compare the covid responses of Trump and DeSantis. Trump essentially turned federal covid policy over to Anthony Fauci (now despised by most conservatives) and Deborah Brix, He was on board with their decision to recommend severe lockdowns. Trump tweeted:

Despite reports to the contrary, Sweden is paying heavily for its decision not to lock down. . . . The United States made the correct decision!

What about DeSantis? He closed schools, bars, and other non-essential businesses for a period of time, as the Trump administration was recommending. However, he decided to open back up in June 2020, ahead of many other states and the recommendations of Fauci and Brix. Fox News reported that a study by the conservative Committee To Unleash Prosperity rated Florida’s covid response as among the best in the nation, along with those of Utah, Nebraska, Vermont, Montana, and South Dakota.

Accordingly, covid response should be a positive for DeSantis in a race against Trump. Certainly, Florida voters, who experienced the pandemic in Florida (and in some cases moved there during the pandemic) think that DeSantis passed the covid response test.

I’d love to hear Trump and DeSantis debate their responses to covid.

In sum, there’s good reason to believe that DeSantis is now more highly regarded than Trump by Republican voters. And there are plausible reasons to believe that DeSantis’ edge will grow as Trump campaigns for the nomination.

As Trump likes to say, we’ll see what happens. Starting tonight.