New Marquette Poll: Trump and DeSantis in virtual tie, Evers sees surge in approval rating
MILWAUKEE (CBS 58) -- 16 months out from the next presidential election, conservative Wisconsin voters are evenly split on who they want to be the Republican challenger, according to the results of a Marquette Law School poll released Wednesday.
It's no secret Wisconsin will be one of the most critical states on the map. The GOP is holding its national convention in Milwaukee next summer.
The two candidates most likely to accept the Republican nomination at that time, former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, were in a virtual tie.
31% of Republican-leaning respondents said they supported Trump, while 30% said they were backing DeSantis. With the margin of error at 4.3%, the two GOP frontrunners were in a statistical tie.
21% of voters said they were undecided. 6% said they preferred former Vice President Mike Pence while 5% backed Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina.
"We should be looking at this for how the election is shaping up now, not as a prediction for where it will end," poll director Charles Franklin cautioned.
One hurdle for Trump going forward will be his unfavorable ratings, which in this poll were more than twice as high as DeSantis', 30% to 14%.
"In our national polling, and most everybody's national polling, we know that there's a group of Republicans in the somewhere between 20 and 30 percent range that are not fond of Donald Trump," Franklin told reporters after the poll results presentation.
Franklin added it wasn't clear how much Trump's criminal indictment influenced how people responded. Trump was indicted on charges of improperly withholding classified documents one day before the six-day survey period, which took place between June 8-13.
When asked to choose only between Trump and DeSantis, 57% of GOP voters said they'd prefer DeSantis compared to 41% for Trump.
The poll also asked voters about possible 2024 matchups. President Joe Biden, whose 45% approval rating was a slight increase from the 41% he had last fall, led both DeSantis and Trump in hypothetical head-to-heads.
Biden led DeSantis 49% to 47%, which was within the margin of error. Biden had a much bigger lead over Trump, 52% to 43%.
"Independents are leaning more to Biden over Trump than they are Biden over DeSantis, so that's the first thing," Franklin said.
Evers' big jump
In the most recent Marquette poll, Evers was underwater as he sought re-election.
47% of voters did not approve of Evers' performance as governor compared to 46% who did approve.
Evers went on to defeat Republican challenger Tim Michels by more than three percentage points, and Wednesday's poll showed an even bigger surge for the two-term Democratic governor.
57% of voters said they approved of Evers' job performance. 39% disapproved, a turnaround Franklin attributed to the shared revenue bill Evers signed into law earlier this month.
NEW: @GovEvers approval rating up to 57% (+18) in this new @MULawPoll
— A.J. Bayatpour (@AJBayatpour) June 28, 2023
Evers was at 46% (-1) last fall.
Much of the movement comes from Evers gaining ground with Republican and Independent respondents
The legislation overhauls how the state supports local governments, and it included a funding increase of at least 20% for all Wisconsin municipalities and counties.
Franklin said given the way other Democrats in the poll saw more modest bumps, Evers' numbers were especially notable.
"Biden and Baldwin's favorabilities moved up by just about three points, whereas Evers moved up by a lot more," he said. "Those are the same people answering those questions, and so, that's the reason to believe Evers has really gotten a significant bounce."
Voters views on abortion, shared revenue and more
One year after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down federal abortion rights in the Dobbs decision, Wisconsin voters' support of legal abortion grew stronger.
66% of respondents said abortion should be legal in all or most cases. That number was 61% last June, when the poll was conducted before the Dobbs decision was announced, but after a draft of the court's opinion was leaked.
Wisconsin currently has an abortion ban that only allows for exceptions in cases where a mother's life is at risk. Democrats have sued, challenging the validity of the law since it had been dormant for decades.
On the issue of shared revenue, 70% of respondents said they supported giving more state dollars to local governments. The idea had bipartisan support, with 53% of Republicans in favor of the concept, along with 85% of Democrats and 73% of independents.
Overall, though, voters were pessimistic about how state government was functioning. 68% of Republicans and 64% of Democrats said they would describe Wisconsin government as "broken."
Wednesday's poll marked a shift in the Methodology used by the Marquette Law School. Instead of calling people randomly, the poll used a hybrid sample of voters selected from the state's list of registered voters and a random list of postal addresses.
Those who responded had the option of filling out the survey online, and that's what the vast majority of the 913 respondents chose to do.