In a startling new red state survey, Trump trails Liz Cheney for 2024
Unexpectedly, people in the Republican heartland of Utah choose Liz Cheney to Donald Trump for the office of president in 2024, indicating difficulty for the president-elect.
Republican voters in Utah, who largely backed Mr. Trump in 2016 and 2020, are starting to place their hopes in two of his most outspoken rivals: retiring Wisconsin Representative Cheney and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
According to Republican respondents in the Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics poll, the one-term president would come in third among potential 2024 GOP presidential candidates. This result has been echoed in recent polls of both Democratic and Republican voters, indicating that the president's "Make America Great Again" grip on the GOP may be waning.
Rep. Cheney, who over the past few years has built her political image around criticizing the twice-impeached president for his behavior inside and outside the Oval Office, came in second in the poll with 16.4% of the vote from Utah GOP primary voters.
Gov. DeSantis, who is expected to run against Mr. Trump on the GOP ticket in 2024, won the poll with 24.2% of the vote, roughly double the support Utahns gave the one-term president. If the Republican presidential primary were conducted today, only 14.4% of respondents said they would vote for Mr. Trump.
But much more damning than that was the survey's finding that, generally, about six out of ten Utahns have a negative opinion of the former president, with those favorability levels just marginally increasing for registered Republican voters.
Last month, Mr. Trump made his third presidential run announcement from his Mar-a-Lago residence. The failure of a so-called "red wave" to materialize during the November midterm elections, a bad showing that some of his GOP colleagues believed he was, at least in part, responsible for, overshadowed that announcement, which came with tremendous pomp and fanfare out of the Trump camp.
Indeed, a survey conducted by WPA Intelligence last week of 1,160 American citizens confirmed as much when it found that 64% of voters, including 60% of those who supported Republicans in the last election, blame the former president for the poor performance of GOP candidates in the midterm elections. Mr. Trump's favorability rating among voters who claimed they divided their votes between a Republican governor and a Democratic senatorial candidate (or vice versa) is a dismal -64 percent.
The results of that poll from last week also suggest that Mr. Trump's favorability among traditional Republicans may be waning. Nearly a third of Republican voters who supported candidates last month now view him negatively, including 33% of self-described "Reagan Republicans" or "Traditional Republicans" and 34% of Fox News viewers.
About half of those self-described "traditional" or "Reagan" GOP voters agreed that Mr. Trump should step down as the party's de facto head. That percentage is slightly lower, at 40%, among all Republican voters, but it is still a sizable portion of the party and the highest level of opposition to Mr. Trump since his 2016 victory.
The previous president's running mate Mike Pence, who polled at 6% with Republican voters alongside Texas Senator Ted Cruz, is another name that has been mentioned as a prospective candidate for the Republican nomination in 2024. previous UN.
Nikki Haley, the ambassador, received 3.7% of the vote, while 20.7% of respondents indicated they had no idea who they would support and 8.5% said they would vote for someone else.
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