By Jason Lange
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Donald Trump is dominating the U.S. Republican presidential nomination contest with 47% support within his party, well above 19% for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll.
The seven-day poll completed on Monday showed Trump, who was president from 2017 to 2021, rising from a June Reuters/Ipsos poll when he was the pick of 43% of Republicans.
The rest of the Republican field remains well behind the two front-runners, with Vivek Ramaswamy, a former biotechnology executive, at 9% in the poll, followed by former Vice President Mike Pence who had 7% support.
Ramaswamy, who only had 3% support in a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in June, has been putting considerable sums of his own money toward promoting his candidacy. On Saturday he disclosed that he had lent his campaign about $15 million.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll, which surveyed 4,414 adults nationwide online, showed a tight race in the November 2024 general election should Trump face Democratic U.S. President Joe Biden, who is seeking reelection and is not expected to face serious competition for his party's nomination.
Biden led Trump 37% to 35% in a hypothetical matchup, with the remaining 28% saying they weren't sure who to pick or would vote for someone else or no one at all.
Neither Biden nor Trump were widely liked by people outside their parties. Just 31% of independents had a favorable opinion of Trump and 32% thought as much about Biden.
At 80 years old, Biden is the oldest U.S. president ever to sit in the White House, and 63% of Democrats in the poll agreed with a statement that he was too old to work in government. Thirty-seven percent disagreed.
Still, Biden leads the Democratic contest by even more than Trump leads the Republican field, with 63% of Democrats' support compared with 15% for anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The poll's results had a credibility interval, a measure of precision, of about 2 percentage points in either direction.