- Talk of the 2024 election has Republican voters wondering who has presidential potential.
- A survey reveals that only 49% of GOP voters say they would support Trump for a second term.
- Gov. Ron DeSantis received support from 25% of survey respondents, mostly in a younger age bracket.
With whispers of who the GOP will turn to amid the 2024 election, a New York Times/Siena College poll revealed Tuesday that half of Republicans are ready to leave former President Donald Trump behind.
In a hypothetical matchup constructed by the Times, voters were asked who their preferred candidate for president would be in the upcoming election. Among Republican respondents, 49% said they would vote for Trump and 25% said they would prefer Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida. DeSantis was the only other potential candidate listed in the poll to receive double digit support from voters, while potential Republicans like Mike Pence, Ted Cruz and Nikki Haley received single digit support. Neither Trump or DeSantis has announced a presidential run, however both have remained at the forefront of 2024 talk in recent weeks.
The survey also showed that younger Republicans and those with a college degree or higher are leaning towards DeSantis as their top choice.
The Capitol insurrection seems to have played a role in the constituents' decisions about who to support. Many Republicans are weary of Trump's conduct in lieu of the House Select Committee's hearings to investigate the riot. Three-quarters of primary voters surveyed by the Times said the former president was just "exercising his right to contest the election," however around 20% said "he went so far that he threatened American democracy."
The Times reported that an "anyone-but-Trump" mentality is growing inside the Republican party and 16% of GOP voters would support President Joe Biden for re-election, vote for a third party candidate, refrain from voting, or don't know how they would behave, should Trump be the Republican nominee.
"I hope he doesn't run at all," Richard Bechtol, a 31-year-old voter from Columbus, Ohio, told the Times in reference to the former president.
Bechtol told the Times that he saw Trump as a "divisive figure" for the GOP and that he is to blame for the violence on January 6. However, Bechtol said that if Trump and Biden faced off again in the next election, he would vote for Trump.
"Biden is getting bullied by the left wing of his party and I worry about his cognitive function as well — actually, I worry about that with Trump, too," Bechtol told the Times. "It's really a lesser-of-two-evils situation for me."
One voter interviewed by the Times, Gretchen Aultman, a 74-year-old former lawyer from Colorado who voted for Trump in 2016, said that if Biden and Trump were caught in a rematch, she wouldn't vote at all. Aultman said that Trump was "tearing the country apart as president," but she couldn't vote for Biden "in good conscience" because of his age and "mental acuity."
Despite some reservations about the former president, the poll suggests that many Republican voters plan to stand behind Trump should he win the primary nomination.
The Times/Siena surveyed 849 registered voters nationwide using live telephone operators from July 5 to 7. They reported their margin of sampling error as plus or minus 4 percentage points. Their methodology is available here.