FireAg said:
LMCane said:
Will Trump and his supporters be bragging about THIS poll today?
A new Emerson College Polling survey of U.S. voters following the August Republican Primary debate finds half of Republican Primary voters (50%) plan to vote for Donald Trump,
the lowest support to date for the former President in Emerson national polls.
Trump's support has dropped by six percentage points since last week's pre-debate national poll.
Brilliant 5D Chess move to not debate leads to 6 point loss
But then the Harris/Messenger Poll comes out this morning, and it shows that where Trump is losing voters, they seem to be gravitating toward Ramaswamy or the rest of the field, but not to DeSantis...
That's where I think the problem is...folks might have growing disfavor of Trump, but DeSantis is not benefiting from that disfavor...at least not yet...
Maybe it changes if he can pull off the win in Iowa and generate a little momentum, but the reviews from debate #1 were mixed at best...
Some polls have shown DeSantis gaining a good bit of ground though, 2 showed him getting over 20% and Trump in the low 40s. I don't see Vivek as a viable alternative in the end and he is going to eventually hit the wall of talk vs results against DeSantis. The key for DeSantis is to get Trump's numbers down and make people realize that while they may sympathize with him he won't win the General. Then it's a matter of beating out everyone else. That's very doable because he is the most acceptable candidate across all groups, very few people truly hate him and wouldn't support him.
Shapiro had an interesting perspective on the debate where he talked about how the different candidates are going after different groups within the GOP and then graded each candidate within those groups. All of the candidates have at least one faction within the GOP that they are an "F" with except DeSantis who is probably least liked by the hardcore NeverTrump Christie crowd (probably a "C") and generally a B with the others (Hardcore MAGA, MAGA Adjacent, and Traditional Republican). He's just not really an "A" with any of them as of now. Hardcore MAGA likes Trump the most and Vivek 2nd, Adjacent MAGA is probably split with Vivek and DeSantis, Traditional Republican likes Haley or maybe Pence or Scott, NeverTrump likes Christie. How many of those folks stick around though?
DeSantis has been playing the long game and that has positives and negatives. He's avoiding mistakes but he's also not making big splashes. Have to see how it plays out in the end but inevitably this is a marathon and not a sprint. Obviously the biggest issue is if Trump either runs away with it or he does something to really damage himself and make people believe he can't win. I don't see any of the other candidates beating DeSantis straight up, none of them have any real organization behind them at all.
We will see.
"The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help."
Ronald Reagan
