Why is there a polling/endorsement gap against Trump?

[Anti-Penguin Tariff Voter]

I’ve noticed in an every early primary state DeSantis (or Tim Scott in SC) has more endorsements from state legislators, yet in every state Trump is polling around the 50% margin. Michigan is the most egregious example, with only 3 state representatives endorsing Trump, who is polling at almost 60%, compared to DeSantis 19 state representatives and ~15% polling.

Has there been a recent primary where most elected officials seem to be grossly out of step with their constituents?

[Sheikh Scott Walker]

Why wouldn't there be a endorsement gap? The average pre-Trump politician hates Trump. He destroyed the reputation of the party and is gearing up to get the party destroyed again in 2024. Republicans lose whenever the election is about Trump.

[The Mikado]

Worth pointing out every single MI US House R has endorsed Trump.

[Vosem]

Even more subtly, Trump's initial primary victory was with a really strange coalition which is almost never assembled for lower-race primaries, and people who try to assemble it are usually easily beaten. (Scattered exceptions like Vance exist, but they're very much scattered exceptions). It's not that most lower-ranked elected officials are pre-Trump holdovers; it's that primaries for lower-ranking offices have very much continued following lots of pre-Trump patterns.

(In terms of someone getting nominated while following a strategy that no one uses successfully for other primaries, Trump is probably the biggest outlier in the history of the primary system. The only even comparable cases are Carter '76 and Obama '08, who interestingly also became Presidents. Historically on the GOP side the link between presidential primary voting patterns and lower-office primary voting patterns was tighter than for the Democrats!)

A different way to put this is that part of the reason remaking the GOP is hard for Trump is that there literally just aren't other Trumps. His appeal is very singular, and even fairly close mimics like Paladino just take loss after loss.