A.G. Gancarski
Gov. Ron DeSantis spent much of this week in the Golden State, but he’s not bringing home any gold medals from California Republicans when it comes to his presidential prospects.
A survey from Emerson College shows DeSantis with 9% support, putting him behind Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s 10% and Vice President JD Vance’s 40%.
Meanwhile, 16% of California Republicans are undecided.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, with 4% support, is the only other Florida man to feature in these numbers.
Vance has dominated virtually all polls of the still embryonic field of potential candidates to succeed President Donald Trump, so there’s no anomaly here in what would be a winner-take-all race for 169 delegates.
For his part, DeSantis has courted controversy among Californians for years, offering memorable denunciations of the state’s approach to illegal immigration and homelessness.
When he was running for President in 2023 and early 2024, DeSantis often established contrasts with California, criticizing its approach to protecting pregnant pigs when wooing Iowa farmer votes, and calling Los Angeles a “disaster zone.”
“When people are telling me that when they go shopping, they take off their jewelry because they don’t want to get mugged, even in nice places in L.A., that’s a huge, huge problem,” DeSantis said in Long Beach.
He also suggested that players on the University of Miami football team were powerless in the face of pot plumes during a road game at California-Berkeley.
“Some of these guys are telling me like they practically got high just from being in the stadium, that literally the whole stadium just reeks of marijuana,” DeSantis said during remarks targeting a cannabis legalization amendment last year.
He also has routinely carped about crap on the streets of a particular major city.
“We’re here in the once great city of San Francisco,” he said during a campaign video. “We came in here, and we saw people defecating on the street. We saw people using heroin. We saw people smoking crack cocaine.”
To prove his point, DeSantis produced a “poop map” of San Francisco during a debate with Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2023.
The Governor’s immigration policy was also condemned by the Salinas City Council ahead of a fundraising event in the city.
If there is any solace to be found in the current polling for DeSantis, he’s at least doing marginally better than he did in some polls when he ran for President in 2023 and 2024, where he had as little as 6% support.
For this poll, 221 California Republicans were polled on Aug. 4 and 5, with a credibility interval of 6.6 percentage points.
