The first New York Times/Sienna College poll of the 2024 campaign season, released Monday, showed former President Donald Trump absolutely dominating the 2024 presidential field. The poll showed Trump with 53 percent support among likely Republican voters, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis with 17 percent, and every other candidate at 3 percent or lower. And the survey found that in a hypothetical one-on-one matchup without the other candidates, Trump leads DeSantis 62 percent to 31 percent.
What’s most striking about the gap between Trump and DeSantis is its consistency among almost every demographic group and ideological sector of the party. Even on abortion, which is both a high-profile policy space and the rare topic that reliably inspires single issue voters in the GOP, Trump leads DeSantis among Republicans who have opposite views on the issue, including the Republicans who strongly support the kind of six-week abortion ban that DeSantis signed into law this year. And one of DeSantis’ key strategies to distinguish himself from Trump — waging a war on “wokeness” with such ferocity that it would make Trump look like a complacent moderate by comparison — has not borne fruit: Trump leads him among Republicans motivated by fighting “radical woke ideology.”
Trump clobbers DeSantis in terms of being seen as “fun.”
One explanation for DeSantis’ difficulties can be found in a somewhat unusual metric: how “fun” voters think a candidate is. As the Times reports, DeSantis actually leads Trump narrowly on being seen as “likable” and “moral.” But Trump clobbers DeSantis in terms of being seen as “fun.” As the Times notes, “the share of Republicans who said Mr. Trump was more “fun” than Mr. DeSantis (54 percent to 16 percent) almost perfectly mirrored the overall horse race.”
That Republican voters view Trump as much more fun than DeSantis doesn’t prove that that quality is one of their chief criteria for preferring him. But it’s a useful proxy for gauging voter perception of Trump’s charisma as a candidate, which becomes a more important factor when it seems ideology doesn’t explain his popularity. As I’ve written in the past, Trump’s political success is inextricably intertwined with his public identity as a comic, jester and troll. Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, used soaring rhetoric about unity to inspire a sense of hope in his supporters. Trump makes his supporters laugh.
One of the voters interviewed in the Times piece even seems to tie Trump’s ability to entertain more effectively than DeSantis with perception of his energy as an executive:
“He does not come across with humor,” Sandra Reher, 75, a retired teacher in Farmingdale, N.J., said of Mr. DeSantis. “He comes across as a — a good Christian man, wonderful family man. But he doesn’t have that fire, if you will, that Trump has.”
One of the weird things about living in a democracy, especially in a presidential system, is that the personality of a politician — rather than their policy views — can become a major factor in how voters assess whether they will vote vote for them. George W. Bush’s 2000 victory over John Kerry is often attributed in part to polling indicating voters would rather share a beer with him than Kerry (never mind that Bush, a former alcoholic, is a teetotaler).









