Ron DeSantis is closing the once-yawning polling gap with former President Trump as he inches closer to a 2024 White House bid.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is closing the once-yawning polling gap with former President Trump as he inches closer to a 2024 White House bid.

A new Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll survey on Monday put DeSantis’s growing strength into stark relief: Since last month, the Florida governor’s standing in a hypothetical 2024 Republican primary improved by 11 points, bringing him up to 28 percent.

Trump’s support, meanwhile, plummeted 9 points to 46 percent. While he still holds a double-digit lead over DeSantis, the poll marks a drastic shift in the former president’s political strength as he embarks on his third campaign for the White House in six years.

“Month after month DeSantis has been rising and now he is cutting significantly into Trump,” Mark Penn, the co-director of the Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll, said. “If they both run, this will be quite a race and Trump could well lose.”

Trump announced last week that he would once again seek the Republican presidential nod in 2024, making good on something he has been hinting at since he left the White House nearly two years ago.

While he had hoped to launch his campaign from a position of strength, the announcement came at a time when a growing number of Republicans are questioning his influence in the party and whether he’s the right candidate to carry the GOP into the next election.

That’s due, in part, to the outcome of the 2022 midterm elections. The so-called red wave that Republicans had long predicted ultimately failed to materialize. While the GOP clinched a narrow majority in the House, the party failed to recapture control of the Senate, and several high-profile candidates endorsed by Trump lost their races.

Since October, Trump’s overall favorability has fallen 5 percentage points. The latest Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll survey found that 44 percent of voters have a favorable opinion of the former president, while nearly half — 49 percent — view him unfavorably.

DeSantis, on the other hand, is riding high after scoring a landslide win in his reelection bid earlier this month. He defeated his Democratic rival, former Rep. Charlie Crist (D-Fla.), by a 19-point margin, while Republicans were successful in several other key contests in Florida. As a result, no Democrat will hold statewide office in Florida for the first time since Reconstruction.

[link to thehill.com (secure)]