Likely Republican Iowa caucusgoers are divided over whether former President Donald Trump should remain the party’s leader, according to the latest release from the new NBC News/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll of the first GOP presidential contest.
Forty-one percent of likely caucusgoers say Trump should continue as the Republican Party’s leader, in line with the 42% of respondents who picked the former president as their first choice ahead of the Jan. 15 caucuses.
Yet a combined 57% of caucusgoers say that Trump was a good president but it’s time to consider other party leaders (26%), or that the party needs a new leader with better personal behavior and a different approach (31%).
When the national NBC News poll asked that same question in June, 49% of GOP primary voters said Trump should remain as the party’s leader; 21% said it was time to consider other leaders; and 29% said they wanted to go in a different direction.
In the new Iowa survey, the likely GOP caucusgoers who want Trump to remain as party leader overwhelmingly pick the former president as their first choice for the state’s Jan. 15 contest.
But among those who say they’re open to new leaders, 38% say their first choice for next year’s caucuses is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis followed by Trump (15%), South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott (9%), and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy tied at 8%.
And those who want to go in a completely different direction are divided in their first-choice support, broken down by DeSantis (23%), Scott (16%), former Vice President Mike Pence (12%), Haley (11%) and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (10%).
The NBC News/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll was conducted Aug. 13-17 of 406 likely Republican caucusgoers, who said that they will definitely or probably attend the 2024 caucuses. It has an overall margin of error of plus-or–minus 4.9 percentage points.