DeSantis Falls to 3rd Place in Key GOP Primary Bellwether State

A new poll in Ohio shows Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in third place in the crucial Republican state.

The poll by Ohio Northern University showed former President Donald Trump on top at 64.1 percent support.

Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy was second at 11.8 percent followed by DeSantis at 8.7 percent.

Former Vice President Mike Pence received 6.4 percent support, former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley was at 2.7 percent, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was at 1.8 percent support while former Arkansas Gov Asa Hutchinson was at 0.8 support.

The survey of 675 Ohio residents, had a margin of error of 3.7 percent. Participants self-identified if they planned to vote in the GOP primary with 44 percent saying they planned to do so.

Since 2000, Republican presidential primaries have usually been won by the candidate who goes on to become the party’s nominee. The one outlier comes from 2016, when former Ohio Gov. John Kasich was running for president and won his home state primary.

In 2000, former President George W. Bush won the Ohio GOP primary, taking it again in 2004 as an unopposed incumbent. The late Sen. John McCain of Arizona won the 2008 Ohio contest, while current Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah won the contest in 2012. Trump, as an incumbent, won in 2020.

Writing in The Washington Post, Philip Bump said the collective damage of third-place polling finishes has been that “DeSantis is just another candidate.”

“This isn’t just bad for DeSantis in that he hasn’t overtaken Trump. It’s bad for him in that this suggests a downward path: from clear second-place candidate to member of the second tier. And for the candidate long pitched as the viable non-Trump candidate, being less viable is a big problem,” he wrote.

A Politico analysis by Rich Lowry, the editor in chief at National Review, touched on difficulties DeSantis had moving from a highly effective and politically popular governor to a presidential candidate trying to swim upstream.

“In Florida, DeSantis had a pragmatic side. He emphasized protecting and cleaning up Florida’s waters. He paid teachers more. Both of these initiatives showed up in that reelection ad. He was effective at handling the response to Hurricane Ian. In the beginning, his different posture on Covid was a data-driven approach based on what seemed likely to work,” he wrote.

“It only hardened into a more of an ideological war against ‘Faucism’ over time,” Lowry wrote.

“The nuts-and-bolts of governing is impossible to replicate on the national stage (except by running a competent campaign). Needless to say, there isn’t going to be an opportunity to handle the state-level response to a, say, blizzard in Iowa or flood in New Hampshire,” he wrote.

Lowry added that “the governor, who already talks about how quickly he repaired a causeway after Ian, should talk more about how effective he’s been, and not just in fighting ‘woke.’”