Two recent polls in Florida show that President Donald Trump’s endorsement is helping the GOP candidate he supports for governor in the August 28 primary.
President Trump tweeted his “full endorsement” of Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) over establishment pick, Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam, on June 22.
A Fox News poll conducted the previous week between June 15 and June 19 had Putnam in the lead over DeSantis by 15 points, 32 percent to 17 percent.
Now, however, “Rep. Ron DeSantis has opened up a 12-point lead in Florida’s Republican race for governor, according to a new independent poll that indicates President Donald Trump is the key to his success,” Politico reported on Tuesday:
DeSantis has built his campaign around the support of Trump, who endorsed the congressman in December and then followed up with another endorsement in June, thereby slighting the establishment front-runner, Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam, who had dissed Trump on the campaign trail in 2016.
DeSantis has featured the Trump endorsement in his mail and TV ads, which he began running last month.
Now that the ads have sunk in, DeSantis leads Putnam 42 percent to 30 percent, said Tony Fabrizio, a top Republican pollster who asked the questions about the governor’s race in a broader survey he took for an unspecified political group that’s not involved in the governor’s race. The primary is Aug. 28.
Among those likely voters who have a history of going to the polls, DeSantis’ lead is even bigger: 47 percent to 30 percent.
Politico did not release the top line summary of the poll conducted by Fabrizio but did include this information on its methodology:
Of the 349 Florida Republicans surveyed by Fabrizio, more than half were aware of Trump’s endorsement of DeSantis, and they supported DeSantis by a margin of 58 percent to 27 percent. Only 8 percent of the respondents said they didn’t know about the endorsement. That group supported Putnam over DeSantis by 23 points.
The poll’s margin of error is plus or minus 6.2 percentage points.
A Gravis Marketing Poll released on Sunday confirms that President Trump’s June endorsement is helping DeSantis. In the GOP gubernatorial primary, he leads Putnam by 6 points, 35 percent to 29 percent. The poll of 901 likely Florida Republican primary voters was conducted between July 13 and July 14 and has a margin of error of 3.3 percent.
A Remington Research Poll conducted between July 2 and July 5 showed DeSantis with a 17-point lead over Putnam, 43 percent to 26 percent. The poll has a 1.8 percent margin of error.
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