Trump making gains with local party leaders

The latest results from my survey of county Republican chairs

I have a writeup of the results of my April survey of county Republican Party chairs at Politico today. I’ll have a few related posts here this week, but for now, I hope you’ll check out this summary piece.

The main points:

• The trends we’ve seen in public opinion polls over the past few months are reflected among these county chairs, as well. Ron DeSantis is still being considered by many, but he’s lost some ground to Donald Trump. Roughly half of chairs still say they’re not committed to a candidate, but among those that have, Trump now leads DeSantis 24-13 (DeSantis was up narrowly in February).

• More chairs are considering supporting DeSantis than are considering Trump, but DeSantis’ numbers have dropped in this category while Trump’s have risen. Similarly, fewer chairs are now dismissing Trump as someone they don’t want to see as the nominee.

• I have 63 chairs who have answered both my surveys, and I did what’s called a Sankey diagram of their support. Maybe it’s not ready for prime time, but I love the way it looks. It shows whom candidates were committed to in February on the left, and how those commitments changed by April on the right. The key takeaway here is that DeSantis had 11 committed chairs in February and now has only four, having lost some to Trump, to other candidates, and to undecided. Trump had eight committed chairs in February and now has 15, having pulled from DeSantis, undecided, and others. (Thanks to Dave Peterson for the dataviz tips.):

Lots more details in the Politico piece! Please check it out.