The divide quickly defining the GOP primary.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ pre-campaign campaign for president has hit the skids — particularly among key blocs of voters he’ll need to dethrone former President Donald Trump next year.
Polls show Trump dominating his likely primary competitor among GOP voters in the so-called “beer track” — a shorthand for the cultural and socioeconomic characteristics of the bloc of voters with lower incomes and levels of educational attainment. While DeSantis is still the preferred candidate of high-income voters and those with college degrees, he is showing signs of bleeding there, too. In recent weeks, Trump’s numbers have been rising among all Republicans, including with GOP voters most skeptical of his candidacy in the so-called “wine track.”
Take, for example, this week’s Quinnipiac University poll which shows Trump leading DeSantis, 46 percent to 32 percent, with the other candidates each registering 5 percent or less. Trump had just a 6-point lead in Quinnipiac’s poll last month.
Trump has a 17-point lead among Republicans without a college degree (up from a 10-point lead in February). And while DeSantis still leads among voters with a four-year degree, 40 percent to 28 percent, Trump has significantly cut into what was a 29-point deficit with those voters in the past month.
Even were he not able to make inroads on DeSantis’ turf, Trump has an inherent advantage. A decades-long realignment has pushed college-educated voters toward Democrats — an already-existing trend that Trump accelerated — making the GOP’s “beer track” the larger cohort among Republican primary voters. Such divides defined the 2016 GOP presidential primary, propelling Trump to a once-unlikely nomination and, ultimately, the presidency.
It’s obviously still early in the 2024 contest: DeSantis isn’t even a declared candidate yet, and most of the new polls were conducted prior to the news that Trump may soon face criminal charges in New York related to an alleged hush-money payment he made during his 2016 campaign to hide an alleged extramarital affair. Other potential legal troubles loom on the horizon.
