Former President Donald J. Trump holds a nearly 50-point lead over Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) in the Republican primary in Tennessee and comfortably leads President Joe Biden in a hypothetical general election match-up, according to a poll.
The Beacon/Targoz poll released Thursday shows Trump running away from the rest of the field at 61 percent of support among likely primary voters. DeSantis, his closest competitor, has just 12 percent support, while former Vice President Mike Pence sits within striking distance of DeSantis with eight percent.
Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) and Vivek Ramaswamy tie for fourth place with one percent each. Former Govs. Nikki Haley (R-SC), Chris Christie (R-NJ), and Asa Hutchinson (R-AR), as well as Gov. Doug Burgum (R-ND) and conservative radio host Larry Elder, did not secure a full percentage point of support.
On the Democrat side, President Joe Biden sits in first place with 63 percent, while Robert F. Kennedy Jr. takes second place with seven percent of the response. Self-help author Marianne Williamson receives two percent to round out the field.
“These primary results reflect what we’ve seen in national polls for months, that a rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump is the most likely scenario in 2024,” Beacon spokesman Mark Cunningham said in an emailed release.
In a hypothetical general election race between Trump and Biden, the 45th president leads by 20 points with 54 percent to Biden’s 34 percent among the unweighted sample size of 1,046 respondents. However, Biden’s disadvantage slightly shrinks when he faces DeSantis instead of Trump. In that scenario, Biden climbs to 36 percent, while DeSantis drops to 52 percent, though the Republican still maintains a double-digit lead.
“It is interesting that Trump fares substantially better against Biden than Ron DeSantis does, and the change came almost exclusively from Republican voters who say they would vote for Trump as their nominee but would not vote at all if DeSantis were the nominee,” Cunningham said.
Moreover, the poll found that 44 percent of Tennessee disapproves of the federal indictment of Trump in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of classified documents that Trump allegedly took to Mar-a-Lago at the end of his presidency. Conversely, 43 percent approve of the indictment to varying degrees.
The poll sampled 1,120 registered voters between June 14 and 22; the margin of error is plus or minus 2.87 percentage points.
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