Florida Fight: Ron DeSantis lags behind Donald Trump on rivals’ home turf

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has touted his gubernatorial record and widespread support in the Sunshine State as evidence of his presidential potential, but by any measure, another Florida man — former President Donald Trump — is miles ahead in the Republican contest.

Take the polls: A University of North Florida survey published Tuesday, on the eve of the third GOP debate in Miami, showed the 77-year-old Trump with a whopping 60% support among likely Republican primary voters.

DeSantis, 45, came a distant second at 21% — 39 percentage points behind. The Florida governor fared little better in a head-to-head matchup — garnering just 29% compared to 59% for Trump.

And then there are the endorsements: Thirteen of Florida’s 20 Republican members of the House of Representatives have publicly supported Trump, with GOP Sen. Rick Scott jumping on the bandwagon earlier this month — snubbing his successor as governor in the process.

DeSantis, meanwhile, has just one federal lawmaker from Florida on his side: Congresswoman Laurel Lee.

DeSantis campaign spokesperson Andrew Romeo told The Post this week that he believes “the polls are wrong” and that he doesn’t think “they indicate what’s going to happen in this race.”

DeSantis’ team has maintained the Republican primary is a “two-man race” between Trump and DeSantis, and that the Florida governor is the only candidate who could beat the former president. The governor is currently focusing the bulk of his efforts on Iowa in hopes of overturning a similarly large deficit there and riding that momentum through the remaining early states.

Florida does not hold its primary until March 19, more than two months after the Iowa caucuses and two weeks after Super Tuesday.

“The reality is that by the time we get to Florida, we’ll have a bunch of good results under our belt. We don’t want to get too far ahead of ourselves,” Romeo added. “We think we will do very well in Florida, but first we gotta go battle him in Iowa.”

While DeSantis support has been noticeably lacking among Republicans in Washington, the governor has received the endorsement of more than 90 officials in his home state.

“For the incumbent president not to be able to pull more than that is kind of embarrassing for him,” Romeo said. “It just shows that Ron DeSantis actually has a lot of strength in Florida.”

DeSantis won re-election last year by nearly 20 percentage points, the biggest margin of victory for a Republican gubernatorial candidate since Reconstruction.

But so far, the 2024 Florida Republican race is on a path resembling the 2016 primary, when Trump romped over native son Marco Rubio by 18 percentage points, ending the Florida senator’s own White House hopes.

“I don’t know if there’s anything anyone can do at this point,” said Michael Binder, faculty director of the Public Opinion Research Lab at UNF, which put out the most recent poll. “It really doesn’t look good for any of the other Republican candidates. Donald Trump has a vise grip on the base of the Republican Party that shows up for theses primaries.”

Armando Ibarra, president of Miami Young Republicans, sounded slightly more optimistic about DeSantis, noting that neither candidate had yet devoted large amounts of resources to Florida and “many voters aren’t fully paying attention to this primary process.”

“As we get closer to the vote here in Florida and campaigns shift their focus more and more to the state, I think we’re bound to see changes in the polls,” Ibarra told The Post.

Once a true battleground state, Florida has trended solid Republican in recent years. Bill Nelson was the most recent Democrat elected to the Senate, in 2012. The last Democrat elected governor was Lawton Chiles, way back in 1994.

Last year, DeSantis became the first Republican gubernatorial candidate since Jeb Bush in 2002 to win deep-blue Miami-Dade County, a task many observers thought impossible before the race.

The rightward shift is driven in large part by the state’s Hispanic voters, who approved of Trump for his hard-line policies toward left-wing totalitarian regimes in Cuba and Venezuela.

However, Ibarra added, “Governor DeSantis is also very well liked” in the community due to his gubernatorial record — particularly his response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

While DeSantis remains popular in Florida, the nature of Trump’s campaign is also “skewing a lot of what we’re used to in presidential politics,” GOP strategist Dave Wilson told The Post.

“He has got a natural following of people who are wanting the Trump-style policies of 2016,” he said. “They don’t like what they got with Joe Biden in 2020, and so there’s this natural tendency to drift back to what we know and they see him as more viable of a competitor to Biden than DeSantis.”