Gov. Ron DeSantis may be at a low point in national polling, at just 14% in the Race to the White House average. But when it comes to one early state, the Governor says he's a "clear second under any metric" to former President Donald Trump.
"Everybody else is in single digits," DeSantis said Wednesday on the Rubin Report. "I wouldn't trade places with anyone in Iowa right now."
The Governor made the case that he's better positioned at this point in the race than previous Iowa caucus winners.
"We've actually had a huge amount of success in Iowa. I mean, if you look back at previous election cycles and find where the Iowa caucus winner was in the summer, people like Ted Cruz and Rick Santorum, they were polling at like 5 or 6%," DeSantis related.
Santorum and Cruz did win Iowa, in 2012 and 2016 respectively, though both wins had caveats. Santorum won by the slimmest of margins in a race that had been seen effectively as a draw in 2012. In 2016, Trump deemed Cruz's victory to be a fraud.
The Iowa result catapulted neither Santorum nor Cruz to the nomination, meanwhile.
Despite Iowa not having a predictive value in recent nomination fights, internal polling from the Governor's orbit has been bullish on DeSantis after the Milwaukee debate.
The survey from Public Opinion Strategies, a DeSantis pollster, "shows DeSantis picking up significant ground since the debate. Both DeSantis and Nikki Haley saw significant increases in their ballot standing since before the debate, while Tim Scott and Vivek Ramaswamy both slipped back a bit."
DeSantis has moved from 14% before the debate to 21% after the debate, per the new poll. That puts him 20 points behind Trump, but 10 points ahead of Haley and 14 points ahead of Ramaswamy and Scott.
Public Opinion Strategies also deems DeSantis the "clear winner" Wednesday, after he "won every single key 'attribute' among likely Iowa caucus-goers" among the eight candidates on stage. The Governor is seen as the "strongest conservative," the "strongest leader," the most "able to defeat" Joe Biden and Trump, and "strongest on border security."
Meanwhile, the average of Iowa polls is still strongly in Trump's favor, according to Race to the White House. Trump has 42% support, 25 points ahead of the Governor.
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