Former President Donald Trump has doubled his lead over Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the race for the 2024 Republican Party presidential nomination, according to a new poll from Fox News.
The latest survey was released on Mar. 29 and showed that Trump has 54 percent support within the party, compared to DeSantis with 24 percent — a 30-point spread. Trump has doubled his lead since the last survey was taken in February, which put the former president up by 15-points.
Over the past few weeks, potential indictments from prosecutors in New York and Georgia have had the effect of causing support for Trump to surge.
“The rumor that Trump is going to be indicted by the district attorney in Manhattan has helped him quite a bit among Republican primary voters,” Republican pollster Daron Shaw, who conducts Fox News surveys said. “They view the case as politically motivated, and it reanimates feelings that Trump is still fighting forces they see as corrupt and out of control.”
Among Democrats, 44 percent want President Biden to be the nominee, up 7-points since last month, Fox reported. The swell of support increased among women (+8), white voters (+9), voters age 45+ (+10), and white voters with no degree (+11), according to Fox’s survey data.
“We haven’t seen much movement at all in attitudes towards Biden this past year, but what we have has been positive,” Anderson told Fox. “He’s holding the line and slowly bringing more people into the fold.”
News of the groundswell of support for Trump comes just days after an unnamed source who was at a recent meeting of top GOP donors told NBC News that among those donors, support for DeSantis was quickly tapering off.
“They liked him — many of them might even support him,” the source, who attended the luncheon with 16 prominent GOP donors, said of DeSantis. “But they thought on balance that his long-term future was better without him trying to take Trump head on.”
“He will get scarred up” by Trump, the source added.
A bright spot for DeSantis is that the latest records from the Federal Election Commission (FEC) show that at the end of February, Trump’s campaign has roughly $10 million on hand, while the DeSantis political committee has roughly $82 million cash on hand.
