This is all before his third indictment came down, related to his actions leading up to the Jan 6th Insurrection.
The twice-indicted former president leads across nearly every category and region, as primary voters wave off concerns about his escalating legal jeopardy.
Former President Donald J. Trump is dominating his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, leading his nearest challenger, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, by a landslide 37 percentage points nationally among the likely Republican primary electorate, according to the first New York Times/Siena College poll of the 2024 campaign.
Mr. Trump held decisive advantages across almost every demographic group and region and in every ideological wing of the party, the survey found, as Republican voters waved away concerns about his escalating legal jeopardy. He led by wide margins among men and women, younger and older voters, moderates and conservatives, those who went to college and those who didn’t, and in cities, suburbs and rural areas.
The poll shows that some of Mr. DeSantis’s central campaign arguments — that he is more electable than Mr. Trump, and that he would govern more effectively — have so far failed to break through. Even Republicans motivated by the type of issues that have fueled Mr. DeSantis’s rise, such as fighting “radical woke ideology,” favored the former president.
Overall, Mr. Trump led Mr. DeSantis 54 percent to 17 percent. No other candidate topped 3 percent support in the poll.
Below those lopsided top-line figures were other ominous signs for Mr. DeSantis. He performed his weakest among some of the Republican Party’s biggest and most influential constituencies. He earned only 9 percent support among voters at least 65 years old and 13 percent of those without a college degree. Republicans who described themselves as “very conservative” favored Mr. Trump by a 50-point margin, 65 percent to 15 percent.
Still, no other serious Trump challenger has emerged besides Mr. DeSantis. Former Vice President Mike Pence, the former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina each scored 3 percent support. Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, and Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur, each received support from just 2 percent of those polled.
Yet even if all those candidates disappeared and Mr. DeSantis got a hypothetical one-on-one race against Mr. Trump, he would still lose by a two-to-one margin, 62 percent to 31 percent, the poll found. That is a stark reminder that, for all the fretting among anti-Trump forces that the party would divide itself in a repeat of 2016, Mr. Trump is poised to trounce even a unified opposition.
The survey comes less than six months before the first 2024 primary contest and before a single debate. In an era of American politics defined by its volatility, Mr. Trump’s legal troubles — his trials threaten to overlap with primary season — pose an especially unpredictable wild card.
For now, though, Mr. Trump appears to match both the surly mood of the Republican electorate, 89 percent of whom see the nation as headed in the wrong direction, and Republicans’ desire to take the fight to the Democrats.
“He might say mean things and make all the men cry because all the men are wearing your wife’s underpants and you can’t be a man anymore,” David Green, 69, a retail manager in Somersworth, N.H., said of Mr. Trump. “You got to be a little sissy and cry about everything. But at the end of the day, you want results. Donald Trump’s my guy. He’s proved it on a national level.”
Both Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis maintain strong overall favorable ratings from Republicans, 76 percent and 66 percent. That Mr. DeSantis is still so well liked after a drumbeat of news coverage questioning his ability to connect with voters, and more than $20 million in attack ads from a Trump super PAC, demonstrates a certain resiliency. His political team has argued that his overall positive image with G.O.P. voters provides a solid foundation on which to build.
But the intensity of the former president’s support is a key difference as 43 percent of Republicans have a “very favorable” opinion of Mr. Trump — a cohort that he carries by an overwhelming 92 percent to 7 percent margin in a one-on-one race with Mr. DeSantis……