Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis began his campaign hailing polling strength in Georgia, but that strength now appears to be all in former President Donald Trump's column after the latest indictment in Fulton County.
Trump not only churns a large majority of support (57%) among likely GOP primary voters in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's latest poll, but leads DeSantis (15%) and the field by 42 points, and by 33 points in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup against DeSantis.
"The indictments are only making Trump's case stronger," Misty White of Rome, Georgia, told the AJC. "People are sick of all this. Did he do wrong? Probably, but at the end of the day, we're concerned with our own pocketbooks, our security as a nation."
The full Georgia GOP primary poll results:
- Trump, 56.5%
- DeSantis, 14.6%
- Former Vice President Mike Pence 3.6%
- Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., 2.8%
- Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, 2.8%
- Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, 2.5%
- Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, 2.4%
- Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, 0.5%
- Former Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas, 0.2%
- Conservative broadcaster Larry Elder, 0.1%
- Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, 0.1%
- Former North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, 0.0%
Additionally, 13.9% of likely GOP primary voters remain undecided.
But there is little doubt overall, among those polled in Georgia, that Trump would "definitely" be the strongest candidate against President Joe Biden next year. That was the claim DeSantis raised before he officially announced his run for the presidency: strength against Biden in key battleground states like Georgia.
"The former president held double-digit advantages in every category of voter polled, leading with the wealthy and the poor, the highly educated and those without high school degrees, the young and the not-so-young," according to the AJC poll analysis.
The University of Georgia's School of Public and International Affairs conducted the AJC GOP Presidential Primary Poll from Aug. 16-23 among 807 likely GOP voters in Georgia, and the results have a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.