RCP Polls continue to show Donald Trump as a Republican Primary-voter favorite for the nomination. Economist/YouGov has Trump with a 36-point lead. HarrisX has it at 45 points. But the Young Republican National Federation Convention picked DeSantis over Trump.
The Young Republican National Federation (YRNF) hosted its annual convention in Dallas, Texas, from August 16 to August 20. The organization focuses on registered Republicans ages 18 to 40, to “provide them with better political knowledge and understanding of the issues of the day,” according to its website.
After the five-day convention—which included speeches from Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Florida Congresswoman Kat Cammack and former Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake—36.6 percent of the attendees indicated that they wanted to see DeSantis as the next Republican presidential candidate. Trump trailed with 35.4 percent of the vote.
DeSantis took the poll with a 1.2% margin, which is something. It’s a big something, actually. It means that if Gov Ron can get young Republicans off the sofa and out from behind whatever screen they are staring at, his chances improve a lot. Bad news for everyone else, though.
The other GOP candidates polling in the top five were businessman Vivek Ramaswamy (9.1 percent), former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley (7.5 percent) and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott (5.5 percent). Roughly 6 percent of participants indicated that they wanted someone else as the next nominee, according to poll results.
Wait, there’s more.
Republican voters also appear to be attracted to younger candidates. Several polls taken after the first GOP primary debate last week showed that the two youngest candidates on stage—DeSantis, 44, and Ramaswamy, 38—were considered the “winners” of the two-hour event.
In one such poll taken by The Washington Post/FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos, 29 percent of the Republican voters surveyed said that DeSantis won, while 26 percent selected Ramaswamy. Another poll, by Leger for the New York Post, found that 23 percent of the 1,800 self-identified GOP voters interviewed said that they felt Ramaswamy came out on top, while DeSantis earned 21 percent of the vote.
Vivek has come a long way from being nobody in the political realm, which explains why he has been taking a beating (at the debate and everywhere else). I’ve received a pile of emails from folks with links, grousing about his sketchy background. I’m not rising that wave at the moment. When Trump ran in 2016, we were quite brutal about his lack of experience and past ties to Democrats, including Hillary Clinton. We backed him to keep Hillary at bay when he won the nomination, but we weren’t as excited about it as we could have been.
But it worked out. Trump may not have been the most polite president, but he did something no other Republican did. He pushed back hard and kept a lot of promises. As Grokster Aaron Warner wrote a few days ago about Trump’s supporters,
They voted to protect the border, he promised to build a wall, and he did. They wanted more jobs for Americans, and he delivered manufacturing plants to the states. They wanted to get out of endless wars, and he refused to start any. They wanted fewer taxes, and so he cut them.
Though he was pilloried as an arch-white supremacist, misogynist, and racist, he somehow managed to create an economy where more black female entrepreneurs succeeded than at any time in history. He freed black prisoners and guaranteed funding to Historically Black Colleges ten times longer than America’s first black president, Harvard’s very own Barack Obama. CNN’s own black analyst, Van Jones even had to tip his hat to Trump’s victories for black Americans.
We wondered about NATO spending, so he took the member countries to task. We didn’t want to suffer the economic disaster of the climate change accords in Paris, so he withdrew us from them. We were tired of fearing Middle Eastern terrorists like ISIS, so he took them out, and we were even more tired of funding them by buying their oil, so he opened up our pipelines and made us energy-independent.
He blew it on the pandemic, mostly by surrounding himself with the wrong people and then letting them have a microphone every day. At least a few Republicans I know will never forgive him or can, and if that’s you, be you just remember the left will try to steal the election regardless of who the nominee is.
As for DeSantis, I’d like to see him poll better. It would keep Trump on his toes and force him to address tough questions like, if they play pandemic politics again, what are you going to do? He posted some video on that here (I have a write about it at 6:30), so that’s a step in the right direction, and we know he’d hold money back from states that deprived you of your rights – assuming he’s serious – but how do we know until he is pressed for direct answers?
That won’t happen if he skips all the debates that he could. Someone polling 30-40 points ahead of the nearest challenge has nothing to gain by standing next to a bunch of folks who, combined, still have less support. But I’d like to see him take the heat. Debate is good. And DeSantis might have found some wind he can get beneath his wings.
