Gosh, I wonder why?
Who could have guessed that would happen?
Republican voters with a college degree and a built-in skepticism of Donald Trump were supposed to form the backbone of Ron DeSantis’ strategy to win the 2024 GOP presidential primary. Instead, they’re leaving his campaign in droves.
A trio of Republican primary polls, including previously unpublished data obtained by McClatchyDC, show that Florida’s governor has suffered steep declines in support among GOP voters with at least a bachelor’s degree, an erosion that threatens to undermine his candidacy. Their defections — which started in the spring and have continued this summer — are disproportionately responsible for DeSantis’ overall decline in the race, where polls show he now sits a distant second place to Trump.
In all three surveys, the governor now has barely half the support with college-educated white voters that he did when the year began, larger drop-offs than he suffered with other demographic groups.
The numbers reflect a pressing problem for the Florida Republican as he seeks to reset his campaign amid fundraising concerns and flagging poll numbers, challenging him to recover the lost support among voters who once made him Trump’s top rival for the nomination. The national surveys paint a troubling picture for his campaign, even as his allies insist that recent state-level polling already shows his candidacy regaining momentum.
A poll from decision intelligence company Morning Consult, for instance, found that DeSantis’ support had dropped 18 points among white college-educated Republicans, from 41% when the year began to 23% in mid-July, according to internal data shared with McClatchyDC.
A poll from market research firm Ipsos, meanwhile, found the governor’s support had been halved since mid-March, when it reported he had 39% among college-educated Republicans, according to data shared with McClatchy. The same survey, released this week, found he had dropped to 20% among those voters, a 19-point decline. (Ipsos’ survey did not distinguish between college-educated white Republicans and college-educated Republicans, although the difference between the makeup of the two groups is small.)
A publicly available survey from Quinnipiac University found the largest drop in support for DeSantis, with the governor going from 51% support in a February poll of college-educated white Republicans to 29% with them now — a 22-point decline. These voters abandoned DeSantis’ campaign at roughly twice the rate as Republicans without a college degree, a review of polling data found.
None of the three surveys asked why DeSantis has lost the support of college-educated Republicans. But in interviews with non-partisan pollsters and Republican political operatives, some of them speculated that the governor’s decision this year to double down on a sharp-edged conservative agenda could have alienated voters who once viewed him as a more pragmatic, mainstream politician.
DeSantis earlier this year signed a law in Florida banning abortions six weeks after pregnancy, and during the campaign, he has sought to outflank Trump on LGBTQ issues while positioning himself as an “anti-woke” warrior eager to combat the political left in all sectors of society.
“College-educated Republicans were looking for an alternative to Donald Trump, and they initially thought Governor DeSantis, after his 19-point win in Florida, made for a good one,” said Whit Ayres, a veteran GOP pollster. “But the way he has run his campaign, constantly tacking to the right, has turned off many of those people who were initially attracted to him.”
Ayres emphasized that he thought DeSantis still had time to recover from his underwhelming start, arguing people who once supported him can be brought back into the fold with a smart strategy that included more moderate positioning. And some Republican operatives disagree that DeSantis’ more conservative tack is at the root of his drop in support, arguing that Trump’s own popularity, combined with an indictment in March that conservatives saw as wildly unjust, is more responsible for the shift than anything the Florida governor did.
DeSantis’ allies say they already see signs that his popularity has rebounded, dismissing the importance of national surveys instead of state-based polling in places with an early nominating contest. A survey released in New Hampshire this week, from University of New Hampshire Survey Center, found DeSantis receiving 23% support, up from 22% in April, while Trump dropped from 42% to 37%. The survey showed DeSantis earning the support of 12% of Republicans with only a bachelor’s degree, and 20% support of GOP voters with a graduate degree.
“You’re going to start to see this narrative continue to develop as more state level polling increases, particularly in those states where you see the impact of our ground game,” said an official with Never Back Down, the super PAC supporting DeSantis. But the official conceded that Trump had gained ground earlier this year after he was indicted by a Manhattan grand jury over allegations he illegally paid hush money to an adult film actress, a prosecution conservatives think is politically motivated. And indeed, while DeSantis’ support with college-educated sank, Trump’s standing with those voters improved markedly since the year began.
Morning Consult, for instance, found Trump’s support nationally with these Republicans improving from 33% to start the year to 46% by mid-July. Among all college-educated GOP voters, Ipsos found him improving from 31% in mid-March to 36% this week. And Quinnipiac showed him growing from 22% support in February to 34% in a survey released Wednesday. In all three surveys, Trump now has more support among college-educated voters than DeSantis.
Trump has always fared better among Republicans without a college degree than those with a degree, dating back to his 2016 candidacy when he shocked the GOP establishment and won the party’s nomination. His presidency, in fact, helped shift the party toward a more blue-collar constituency, facilitating an influx of those voters into the GOP’s fold while simultaneously pushing many college-educated men and women, including former Republicans, to start backing Democratic candidates.
Compared to GOP voters without a college degree, GOP pollsters say, college-educated Republicans are socially moderate and fiscally conservative, with some of them both repelled by Trump’s rhetoric and uninterested in his stated aim of making the party’s economic agenda more populist They might have expected a different approach from DeSantis, political experts say, and soured on him when he didn’t meet that expectation.
“College-educated voters tend to be more liberal,” said Tim Malloy, a polling analyst with Quinnipiac. “And DeSantis has gone right a good deal more than many expected him to do so.”
DeSantis’ support has suffered among Republicans without a college degree, too, though at lower rates than he has among those with degrees. Among non-college white Republicans, Morning Consult and Quinnipiac found DeSantis’ support dropping 10 and 11 points since the start of the year. Ipsos found his support among non-college Republicans dropping six points since March.
DeSantis’ overall standing in the GOP primary has declined markedly since the start of the year, according to an average of polls compiled by FiveThirtyEight.com. The site has found his support dropping from about 37% to start the year to about 21% now. Some Republican strategists argue that amid such an overall drop, DeSantis’ standing with college-educated voters was bound to suffer, especially given that he had more of them to lose when the year began. And they question whether DeSantis’ loss of support among college-educated voters is really driving his overall decline.
GOP pollster Patrick Ruffini, for instance, found that DeSantis and Trump were running roughly even with “very conservative” Republicans at the end of last year. The former president, however, had a 65-point edge with those same voters in June, according to a survey his firm conducted.
In an interview, Ruffini said he thinks Trump’s numbers were temporarily low after a disappointing midterm election last year, a time when he had done little campaigning and voters were upset the party hadn’t won control of the U.S. Senate majority. Those frustrations have gradually subsided since, he said. “You add on top of that something most Republicans see as a tainted and partisan prosecution, and it’s not hard to process what’s been happening here,” he said.
He’s tanking with everyone but it stands to reason that anyone who thought he would be a more moderate, pragmatic type of Republican have realized by now that he’s a hard right culture warrior and that’s about it.
Those college educated voters who have migrated back to Trump because he’s allegedly under siege from a partisan prosecutor need to go back to school.