IA - Victory Insights: Trump at 61%, DeSantis and Pence deadlocked w/o Trump

[Mr. Morden]

Trump 61%
-no other candidate breaks 10%-
Pence
Haley
Romney
Cruz
DeSantis
Noem
Pompeo

I don’t see the exact numbers listed in the doc, but from eyeballing the graph, I think this scenario is something like:

Trump 61%
Pence 8%
Haley 6%
Romney 5%
Cruz 4%
DeSantis 4%
Noem 2%
Pompeo 2%

w/o Trump

DeSantis 25%
Pence 23%
Cruz 15%
Noem 7%
Pompeo 5%
Haley 4%
Romney 1%
Someone else 6%
Undecided 14%

No, I think you’re reading it wrong.  These are not the numbers in the scenario without Trump.  They’re the numbers for 2nd choice amongst Trump supporters in the scenario *with* Trump.  In the scenario without Trump running, the numbers are more like this (again, I’m just getting this from eyeballing the graph on page 4, since they don’t actually list the #s anywhere):

DeSantis 20%
Pence 19%
Cruz 16%
Haley 10%
Noem 7%
Pompeo 6%
Romney 5%

After 2nd alignment

DeSantis 24%
Pence 23%
Cruz 21%

https://www.scribd.com/document/498489924/IowaGOPCaucus2024-PollReport-03-2021

This pollster is pretty clueless about the Iowa caucuses, since they seem to think that the GOP caucus has multiple rounds.  It’s only the Dem. caucuses that have multiple rounds, so there is no “2nd alignment” on the GOP side.

[Mr. Morden]

In any case, this is another piece of evidence that DeSantis-mentum is real.  He was at something like 1 or 2% in every poll as recently as December.  Now he's consistently at least in the "top tier", if not leading, in polls that include him in a scenario without Trump.  That's a pretty significant bump considering how far out we are from the primaries.