Poll: Ron DeSantis drawing 14% support in California GOP presidential primary

New polling from California finds Gov. Ron DeSantis with less than 15% support in the state where he debates Wednesday night and has been campaigning and fundraising all week.

In the Public Policy Institute of California survey conducted between Aug. 25 and Sept. 5, the Florida Governor trails former President Donald Trump, 48% to 14% overall. But with some subgroups, Trump is doing better than others.

“Trump leads DeSantis by 46 points among those with no college degree (57% to 11%) and by a smaller margin among college graduates (27% to 21%). Trump leads DeSantis by a wide margin among conservatives (53% to 16%),” the memo accompanying the results notes.

At this writing, the main suspense in California isn’t whether Trump can get plurality support, but majority support.

California’s delegate apportionment rules grant all of the state’s 169 delegates to a candidate above 50%. That means if Trump were to hold this level of support next year, the former President will take all the delegates unless changes to the formula are made at this weekend’s GOP Convention.

Another recent poll from the Berkeley Institute of Government Studies showed Trump with 55% support, which would of course satisfy that condition.

DeSantis will actually debate California Gov. Gavin Newsom in November, but his 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.

During remarks to the Concerned Women for America, the Florida Governor and 2024 presidential candidate offered a “contrast” between the Sunshine State and the Golden State, which has a different view about the rights of minors than DeSantis’ Florida.

“Look at the contrast we have between a state like Florida, which honors parents’ rights, versus a state like California that is now doing legislation that says if you as a parent have a child — maybe like a 10-year-old son — and the son comes to you and says that they think that they’re really a girl, if you say no, you could lose custody of your own kid,” DeSantis said.

“That is an assault on parents’ rights, that is an attack on the American family and in the state of Florida, those policies are dead on arrival.”

DeSantis’ ire was inspired by California’s just-passed Assembly Bill 937, which compels judges to consider a “parent’s affirmation of the child’s gender identity or gender expression as part of the health, safety and welfare of the child.”

The Governor, while at a Never Back Down bus tour stop in Iowa, 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.”

“It doesn’t even make any sense,” DeSantis said.

Earlier this year, in a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of a California law called Proposition 12, which mandates more room for breeding pigs. The court sided with the state against the National Pork Producers Council and the American Farm Bureau Federation, industry groups that contended California law would impose unreasonable burdens on pig farmers.

The California law holds “no person shall knowingly engage in a commercial sale within the state of whole pork meat for human food if the whole pork meat is the product of a breeding pig, or the product of the immediate offspring of a breeding pig, that was confined at any time during the production cycle for said product in an enclosure that fails to comply with all of the standards set forth in Chapter 10, Article 3, regarding Breeding Pigs.”