Does Governor Ron DeSantis need to chat with Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis? The former, a right-side all-star, has struggled to gain traction on the national stage, and the latest hint of disconnect comes from a Poll that has him tied with Vivek Ramaswamy.
Ruh-Roh?
I don’t think so, not yet. The sample size is not huge (800 likely GOP primary voters), and no other poll has any result comparable to it. A July 20 Reuters Ipsos poll has Vivek at 9% (DeSantis at 19) while Quinnipiac has Desantis at 25 and Ramaswamy at 2. Ramaswamy lands fourth behind Pence in almost every other sample, with DeSantis second and Trump way ahead.
And not to take anything away from Vivek. He was a nobody on the political stage who put in the work and is saying all the right things, and he has managed to attract enough attention to find himself polling alongside people with a lot more name recognition. The goal is (obviously) to get on the debate stage and impress an audience that still may not know who he is or what he thinks needs doing.
Of course, nearly everyone could be on the stage of the first debate. You only need to poll at 1% in three national polls to qualify, and to date, only Burgum, Hutchinson, and Elder consistently poll at zero. Maybe they can hand their Trump-bashing notes to Christie, Scott, Pence, and Haley.
And no one should dismiss the Kaplan poll out of hand, certainly not the DeSantis campaign. But until it gets mirrored in the more significant polls, we should not expect much to change, even though something should. DeSantis is the not-Trump candidate preferred by most Republicans, but until he’s something more than that, he’s not going to make a serious dent in The Donald’s significant lead.
