Ron DeSantis has dropped out of the 2024 GOP presidential race — and the latest polling seems to suggest it won’t do much to help Nikki Haley catch Donald Trump.
From InsiderAdvantage:
A Sunday InsiderAdvantage poll of 850 likely voters in the New Hampshire GOP primary, conducted after Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the suspension of his campaign for the Republican nomination for president and endorsement of Donald Trump, shows former President Trump leading former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley by a substantial margin. The poll conducted January 21 has a margin of error of 4.32% with 95% confidence level.
The Results:
Nikki Haley: 35%
Donald Trump: 62%
Undecided: 3%
InsiderAdvantage’s Matt Towery: “I have polled New Hampshire presidential primaries for many years and fully understand that this is a state that is hard to poll and where respondents sometimes are “playful” in their answers to pollsters. With that in mind, it appears that a major consolidation took place when Ron DeSantis’s name no longer was part of the survey. Of course his name will still be on the ballot so there will be some minor difference in results. That said, Donald Trump accelerated his lead from the fifty-percentile range in the majority of earlier polls, to the sixty-percentile range in this survey. I have stated in the past that I felt New Hampshire might be a bit of an aberration as compared to most other GOP caucuses and primaries (more moderate with many independents voting). However, with DeSantis’s announcement even the “Undeclared Voter” demographic no longer appeared to change the results. There has been a theory that Democrats voting as undeclared voters, along with moderate Republicans following the lead of New Hampshire’s Governor Chris Sununu, would pile in to create a substantial threat to Trump. I could certainly see the final results drifting into a 58%-41% (1% to others) Trump/Haley situation, but could just as easily see Trump continue upwards past the 62%-35% level. Trump respondents seem resolute in their support in the survey and that suggests that they have a high likelihood to turnout to vote on Tuesday. Ironically we polled Trump at a 51% win in Iowa (he received 51%) which was lower than that of many other public pollsters. We generally tend to under-poll Trump this year, so these numbers are a bit more substantial for him than expected.”
DeSantis backed Trump after dropping out of the race on Sunday. “[Trump] has my endorsement because we can’t go back to the old Republican guard of yesteryear–a repackaged form of warmed-over corporatism that Nikki Haley represents.”
