By Fred Lucas
Wednesday, August 10, 2022
Ron DeSantis maintains a big lead over Donald Trump
among swing voters — at least on social media, according to one firm that
monitors a core “focus group” of 40,000 political posters.
The findings come from an outfit called Impact Social, a
firm hired by a pro-DeSantis group to crunch social-media data. The analysis
doesn’t sugarcoat the results for the group that hired it; both DeSantis and
Trump have net negative scores. But DeSantis, at -4, is doing way better among
swing voters than Trump, with a -41 score, though this was measured before
the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago, an unprecedented event whose impact on
perceptions of the former president has yet to be seen.
So what do those scores mean? In short, they reflect a
metric used by Impact Social to measure the sentiments — positive and negative
— of posts from those 40,000 accounts determined to belong to swing voters
based on their presence on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and other platforms.
(The analysis sometimes refers to them as “floating” voters.) Glowing
social-media posts contribute to a higher score for the candidate being
measured, and vice versa. Quantifying the average tone in a sea of social-media
posts might seem an unconventional way to gauge support, and it is. But the
analysis has a vastly larger sample size than most traditional polls.
By this measure, at least, DeSantis appears to have the
edge over Trump heading into a hypothetical 2024 presidential fight — perhaps a
sign of ephemeral political passions, or perhaps the sign of a broader shift,
among persuadable voters.
“In DeSantis’s favor are those who declare that he is a
politician who holds the right instincts and has the record in office to prove
it,” says a summary of the Impact Social findings measuring posts about Trump
and DeSantis from July 13 through July 27. “For team DeSantis that is
encouragement enough. Yet they will be further heartened by those floating
voters willing to go online and – totally unprompted – state that DeSantis is
their preferred Republican candidate.”
The Ready for Ron PAC, which is not affiliated with either the
Florida governor or his gubernatorial reelection campaign, hired the firm to
assess relative perceptions of Trump and DeSantis. Ready for Ron is both
attempting to draft DeSantis to run for president and build an infrastructure
for him should he decide to do so.
The more traditional polls have shown DeSantis gaining ground on Trump,
including a June poll of New Hampshire voters that found a
statistical dead heat in the first-in-the-nation primary state.
However, Trump still leads in most national polls of Republicans and easily
smashed DeSantis in the CPAC straw poll over the weekend in Dallas,
69 percent to 24 percent. He won by a similarly big margin at CPAC in Orlando
earlier this year. Straw polls aren’t precise; ask Ron Paul. But for the time
being, Trump appears to be the presumptive early front-runner in a 2024 primary
battle that hasn’t formally started.
That said, hearings by the congressional January 6
committee investigating the Capitol riot have damaged Trump, as have a barrage
of news stories about his potential prosecution, according to Impact Social —
at least among voters beyond the CPAC-aligned base.
An analysis conducted from June 29 through July 13,
during the heat of the hearings, showed net sentiment for Trump dropping eleven
points from -30 to -41. The good news for Trump in the subsequent analysis is
that he remained at -41. By contrast, DeSantis was at -6 in the analysis
through July 13 and increased to -4 for the following period, July 13-27. This
indicates Trump might have reached a floor but, perhaps, DeSantis hasn’t yet
hit a ceiling.
“Trump will need to prove to the GOP primary electorate
that he has what it takes to win over swing voters regardless of who the
Democrats put forward,” the Impact Social summary says, noting that the posts
in question focus negatively on his behavior and the allegations against him.
DeSantis, however, faces a different situation. While
much of the negativity aimed at the former president is “all about Trump,” much
of the negativity toward DeSantis flows from liberal-leaning swing voters who
apparently fear him.
“Much of the negativity derives from those sitting
ideologically on the left who openly state that DeSantis is more dangerous than
Trump and will be harder to beat come 2024,” the analysis says, adding that
there are “right-leaning voters who feel that he is far removed from the small
state, libertarian-minded GOP candidate they would prefer.”
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