Former President Donald Trump’s decision to skip the first GOP debate in the 2024 presidential race doesn’t seem to have moved the needle on his lead nationally in a dramatic manner — but a closer look at one key race might mean the former president’s no-show was a bit more problematic than it seems nationally.
According to a Citizen Awareness Project/Public Opinion Strategies poll taken on Thursday, the day after the debate, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is now within the margin of error in a two-person race with Trump in Iowa, which will hold the first-in-the-nation caucuses.
While Public Opinion Strategies is working for the DeSantis’ campaign, it’s worth noting that the pollster’s numbers for Trump were far better in a pre-debate survey, where the former president led on a two-way ballot 51 percent to 34 percent.
In a post-debate matchup, he led DeSantis by 3 percentage points, 43 percent to 40 percent — within the survey’s 4.9 percent margin of error. The poll was taken among 400 likely Republican caucus-goers on cell and landline phones.
The governor also saw the largest leap in his favorability rating in pre-debate and post-debate numbers, jumping from 68 percent favorability to 72 percent. South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott was the only other candidate to gain ground, with a net change of 1 percent favorability.
Trump, meanwhile, lost 9 points, going from 71 percent favorable and 27 percent unfavorable to 67 percent favorable and 23 percent unfavorable.
The only candidate to do worse was former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who lost 14 points, proving that trying to replicate his 2016 Marco Rubio takedown on every candidate for an entire debate season isn’t going to be a viable strategy.
Iowa is likely to be the first state in the nation to choose candidates in the 2024 race, although this is somewhat up in the air for supremely dumb technical reasons.
According to the Des Moines Register, Democrats have been trying to offer a mail-in version of the caucus for their contest — and if they do so, New Hampshire officials have said they would consider this a primary, not a caucus.
Since New Hampshire has a law stating it must hold the first primary in the nation, this means the Granite State could leapfrog Iowa — although Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, signed a law in June requiring the caucuses to be held in person. You will be responsible for knowing all of this on the test.
This minutia is important, however, because DeSantis has been campaigning hard in Iowa — including a recent appearance at the state’s famous “Field of Dreams” cornfield baseball stadium, where, according to The Associated Press, the former Yale baseball player was hitting balls and throwing pitches while former President Trump was undergoing his legal Sturm und Drang down in Georgia.
Trump skipped the first debate, in part because he accused host network Fox News of bias against his campaign in favor of DeSantis’. In addition, he cited the fact that he was “leading the field by ‘legendary’ numbers” in a post on Truth Social as a reason for avoiding the Milwaukee debate. Instead, he sat down for an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson on the social media platform X.
According to the RealClearPolitics polling aggregate, Trump’s numbers have dipped only slightly since the Wednesday debate, and the polls taken since then have him with leads ranging from 27 to 52 points nationally.
However, the move to skip the debate didn’t help any: As The Hill noted, Trump was down 6 points in one of those polls, an Emerson survey that still found him taking home 50 percent of support. That’s down from 56 percent in a pre-debate Emerson poll, however, and the lowest numbers he’s received thus far.
And while DeSantis didn’t exactly have a breakout performance — nobody seemed to, in fact — the governor certainly didn’t do badly.
He managed to get in one of the more memorable lines of the night, saying that we “must reverse Bidenomics so that middle-class families have a chance to succeed again” and that America “cannot succeed as a country if you are working hard and you can’t afford groceries, a car or a new home while Hunter Biden can make hundreds of thousands of dollars on lousy paintings.”
Our country is in decline. This decline is not inevitable. It is a choice.
We need to reverse American decline, and it starts with understanding that we must reverse Bidenomics.
As your president, I will get the job done. I will not let you down. pic.twitter.com/cgoAlpYw8a
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) August 24, 2023
Skipping the debate was a calculated risk for Trump. To a certain extent, you saw how it could pay off, as the most Trump-adjacent candidate — businessman Vivek Ramaswamy — received most of the fire that would have otherwise been reserved for the front-runner.
However, it also gave DeSantis and other candidates a chance to move out of the former president’s shadow. In this case, it looks like it’s paid off in Iowa, where the debate has given the Florida governor a major bump if (and it’s a big if, depending on how many candidates drop out and/or become irrelevant) this becomes essentially a two-man race.
Trump doesn’t have to win Iowa to maintain his front-runner status, mind you; he lost it in 2016 to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and still went on to take the nomination in convincing fashion.
However, a loss in Iowa to DeSantis would prove, at the very least, that the former president isn’t invincible — and that would shake up the 2024 race in dramatic fashion, no matter how “legendary” the former president’s polling lead remains.
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