An old Tupac Shakur song claimed "California loves to party." And if it were remixed today, it might claim that the state's Republicans also love to support Donald Trump.
That's one potential interpretation of the latest Public Policy Institute of California poll, a survey showing Ron DeSantis lingering in low double digits, and the former President with majority support. That's a significant threshold, given a majority of the vote would mean the "winner-takes-all" rule would be in effect, allocating the state's 169 convention delegates entirely to the former President.
Trump has 53% support among the 316 Republicans expected to vote in the Primary, with DeSantis at 12% — the same number he had in the newest University of California Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies survey, which was also released this week.
And just like in the UC-Berkeley survey, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is close behind DeSantis, with 9% support.
DeSantis performs better in some regions than others. In Orange County and San Diego, he has 16% support, his best performance of the five geographic zones. He's also at 13% in the Central Valley, where Salinas' Democratic-controlled City Council passed a resolution condemning the Governor's fundraising trip to the locality.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, DeSantis drops below the overall poll performance, with 11% support, good for a tie with now-withdrawn candidate Mike Pence and 3 points behind tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy (as well as 20 points behind Trump).
The Governor has pilloried the city of San Francisco in stump speeches, saying during a recent visit he saw "people defecating on the sidewalk ... people using fentanyl ... people smoking crack right there in the open" in what he called a "civilization in decay."
DeSantis is at 8% in the Inland Empire and Los Angeles areas. Trump and Haley lead him in the former, and Trump, Haley and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie lead DeSantis in L.A.
Despite (or perhaps because of) his rhetoric about stopping illegal immigration, it's worth noting the Governor's overperformance with two demographic segments. He's at 21% with Hispanic voters, which is his best number in the poll. And he's at 19% with naturalized citizens, many of whom would have emigrated legally to the United States.
This poll was in the field from Oct. 3 through Oct. 19. DeSantis is down 2 points from the previous survey by the same pollster, conducted in late August and early September.
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