Trump extends lead among Republicans as DeSantis slips further back, new poll shows

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Florida Gov Ron DeSantis is seeing his support in the Republican primary race crater as rivals gain ground against him while former President Donald Trump’s dominance over the party appears to be holding steady.

A new CBS News poll of likely Republican primary voters across the country shows Mr DeSantis trending downwards, currently at 16 per cent after dropping seven percentage points over a two-month span. In the time since CBS polled voters in June, the governor has slipped from 23 per cent while businessman Vivek Ramaswamy has surged into third place.

The survey comes on the heels of another national poll, this one from Emerson College, showing the governor and Mr DeSantis tied at 10 per cent each behind Mr Trump. It’s a disaster scenario for Mr DeSantis, who has failed to make any inroads against the first-place contender and instead has fired staffers, blown millions of dollars, and pledged a campaign shake-up while rivals are biting at his heels.

His statewide polling is just as bleak. A collection of Iowa polling shows Mr DeSantis firmly in second place despite throwing much of his time and effort into the state and even securing an alliance with Kim Reynolds, the state’s popular GOP governor.

Mr Trump, meanwhile, appears to be only solidifying his support among Republicans as his criminal charges mount and his resulting legal costs continue to climb. Despite more and more Republicans warning that he has too many vulnerabilities to be their party’s nominee, the GOP voting base appears on course to nominate the four-times-indicted ex-president to take on Joe Biden once again.

Polling of Mr Trump’s hypothetical matchup against Joe Biden show the two roughly tied at the national level but with Mr Biden holding a slight advantage in key swing states like Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin, which sealed Mr Trump’s defeat in 2020.

The CBS poll surveyed 538 likely GOP primary voters between 16-18 August; the poll’s margin of error for the Republican voter subset is 5.7 percentage points.