Trump maintains strong lead among county chairs, with Haley a solid second

The latest county chair survey at Politico

The topline results for my latest survey of county Republican Party chairs is up at Politico today. The basic finding, by several different measures, is that Donald Trump has a massive lead among county chairs that has held over the past few months, while Nikki Haley has risen as the alternative candidate. A third of chairs still consider themselves uncommitted, but that share has dwindled since the summer. The “middle management” of the party is looking pretty firmly behind Trump just weeks before the Iowa caucuses.

As usual, here’s a bonus figure you won’t see at the Politico piece. It shows the percent of chairs considering a candidate along the horizontal axis and the percent opposed to the candidate on the vertical axis. Each candidate appears twice, with hollow dots representing their numbers in the October survey and solid dots the December survey. The arrows show just how much movement has occurred. Generally speaking, the best candidates can do is to move downward and rightward – lowering the number of chairs who oppose them while improving the number who are considering them.

As these results show, there’s really only three candidates really being considered — Trump, Haley, and DeSantis — they’re relatively high on the number of chairs considering them and low on the number who do not want them. Trump has become somewhat more unpopular since the last survey. Vivek Ramaswamy has clearly joined the ranks of the candidates no one is considering, having sharply increased his “do not want” numbers.