Ron DeSantis says latest Iowa poll gives him a ‘path’ to win

Florida’s Governor is offering a counternarrative to new Iowa polling that shows him mired in a second-place tie with Nikki Haley in the pivotal Iowa caucuses.

Ron DeSantis says he is focusing on the positives in the survey data, which showed Haley tied with him at 16%, 27 points behind Donald Trump.

“It did say that I have the highest favorability and the highest percentage of Iowans that are considering voting for me and I clearly have a path to win the caucus. I don’t think anyone else other than me or Trump has that path based on the underlying data,” DeSantis said on Tuesday’s Hugh Hewitt Show.

The Governor’s read of those data points is accurate. A total of 52% of participants in the Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa Poll of 404 likely Hawkeye State caucus participants said DeSantis was their “second choice” or that they were “actively considering” the Governor. DeSantis is also at 69% favorability, the highest of the candidates.

But while those trends augur well for DeSantis, the topline surveying the first choice of voters is brutal. Haley has gained 10 points since the poll was last in the field, while DeSantis has lost 3. Yet the Governor didn’t address the most meaningful poll trend in the Hewitt interview.

“Because of the work we’ve done, we have the widest possible pool of voters to draw from of any candidate that’s running, just based off that poll yesterday,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Haley campaign sees the Iowa poll as just the latest to suggest that the presidential race is “a two-person race between one man and one woman,” with an email noting that polls in New Hampshire and South Carolina show her in second place, and now a poll in a third early state tells the same story.

Meanwhile, with 43% support, the Trump camp is looking back at the field and trumpeting its “dominant lead.”