Poll: Ron DeSantis trails Donald Trump by nearly 40 points in California GOP Primary

Ron DeSantis in San Francisco. Screenshot via DeSantis For President.

New polling from the Golden State is bad for Florida’s Governor.

In a survey released by Berkeley’s Institute of Government Studies, Ron DeSantis has just 16% support among California Republicans. Meanwhile, Donald Trump has 55% support.

DeSantis has lost more than half of his support from polls taken earlier this year.

“Trump’s increasing support in the state has come largely at the expense of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. DeSantis, who briefly led Trump among GOP voters here earlier in the year, has seen his support decline precipitously throughout the year. Just 16% of California Republicans are now backing his candidacy, down from 26% in May and 37% in February.”

California’s delegate apportionment rules grant all of the state’s 169 delegates to a candidate over 50%, meaning that if Trump holds this level of support next year, the former President will take them all.

DeSantis is the closest thing to competition for Trump in the state. Nikki Haley’s 7% is good for third place. No other candidate even has 5% support.

The poll was administered online in English and Spanish from Aug. 24-29 among 6,030 California registered voters, with 1,175 Republicans likely to vote in the GOP Presidential Primary surveyed.

Trump and DeSantis will both have opportunities to talk to the state’s Republicans in the next few weeks, as both are slated to speak at the GOP Convention, which is at the end of the month. DeSantis will also be fundraising in Salinas and possibly other cities when he’s out west.

The Governor’s gripes about the Golden State have been a recurring theme of his campaign up until now, including cautionary tales about San Francisco.

“Don’t tell me it doesn’t affect people’s lives. I was just in San Francisco. I saw — in 20 minutes on the ground — people defecating on the sidewalk. I saw people using fentanyl. I saw people smoking crack right there in the open, right there on the street. It was a civilization in decay,” the Governor said at a Faith & Freedom Coalition event in June.

Earlier this year, DeSantis offered a provocation to the state when he sent a flight full of undocumented immigrants from Texas to California, which he bragged about during an event in neighboring Arizona.

“These sanctuary jurisdictions are part of the reason we have this problem because they have endorsed and agitated for these types of open border policies,” DeSantis said in June.

The Governor has also attacked California law mandating humane treatment for pregnant pigs (something Florida has in its Constitution). While at a Never Back Down bus tour stop in Atlantic, Iowa, he said his presidential administration would not “let California regulate how farmers in Iowa conduct their business on things like, you know, these pork producers have to follow California law to do this stuff.”