It's a year out.
It's a year out from the 2024 general elections and Wisconsin Republican voters are showing signs of increased support for Donald Trump, but also for Nikki Haley.
The latest Marquette University Law School poll took the political pulse of the state electorate.
Poll Director Charles Franklin is here to describe the numbers and Charles, nice to see you.
Good to be back.
So with this week's Republican primary debate and Donald Trump's highly visible court cases, voters definitely have their eyes on the presidential race.
In your poll that was in the field last week, it shows that Biden tops Trump by two points right now in Wisconsin.
But if Trump were out of the mix, interestingly it shows that Ron DeSantis tops Joe Biden by two points.
And then even more interestingly, it shows that Nikki Haley tops Biden by nine points.
So what is that about in a state and in all the states where Trump has this huge lead against both those people?
Well, in the primaries, Trump's lead is huge.
It's 20 points in our poll this time for Republicans.
But the two-point margins for Trump or for DeSantis are margin of errors four and a half points.
So those are really toss-ups.
But you can see DeSantis doing a little bit better than Trump does when paired against Biden.
What's interesting as you say is the Nikki Haley performance of plus nine lead for her.
I mean, that's phenomenally not realistic if we were in a general election.
But what we see in the data is first about a third of the public say they don't know much about Nikki Haley.
And when she's paired against Biden, I think that lack of knowledge and the fact that she's not closely identified with the Trump wing of the party
allows independence and some Democrats who have reservations about Biden for various reasons, the economy, his age and so on.
It allows them to say they would vote for that Republican who's not from the Trump wing of the party.
Conversely, people's opinions of Trump and Biden are so set in stone that we end up with this near tie there.
And indeed, independence split evenly between Trump and Biden.
But independence give 58% of their vote to Nikki Haley.
So could you have conceived a race where the front runner, that being Donald Trump, just doesn't do debates,
not to mention he's under indictment and is still gaining in the polls?
Yeah. His hold on the party is very strong to begin with.
But not as strong as maybe myth would have it.
We find about 70% of Republicans with a favorable view of Trump and about 30 with an unfavorable view of him among Republicans.
That 30% almost none of them support Trump in the primary, but they haven't coalesced around anybody else.
At the beginning of the year, DeSantis was actually drawing about 30% of the vote among people who liked Trump, among Republicans who liked Trump.
But that has plummeted since then.
So the pro-Trump wing of the party really has coalesced around him and abandoned thinking about DeSantis.
But none of the other candidates have really coalesced that 30% or so that don't like Trump.
And that's why DeSantis scatters between DeSantis and Haley, and then very small percentages for everybody else.
Let's take a look at what your survey found in the state of Wisconsin.
Your poll shows that Tony Evers is right-side up with approval ratings, while the legislature is way upside down.
And the state Supreme Court is also enjoying some firm approval.
What do these numbers tell you?
The numbers tell just below 50% approval before he was re-elected last November.
He bumped up in June and has come down about three points now, but he's a net positive.
The legislature, on the other hand, when we last asked, which was back in 2022, had been pretty close to even.
So they seem to have slipped considerably in the meantime.
And we haven't asked about the state Supreme Court before this is our first time.
It's very 51% approval, which is fine.
But the court will be in the news in coming months, and we'll see how the public reacts to that as the court becomes more visible in the news.
I found your survey results on the redistricting interest in your poll shows that 51% want to keep the current maps until 2031.
Now, those maps are the object of so much vocal disfavor.
What do you make of these results?
Two things.
First, we did not mention gerrymandering or partisan districting in the question.
That was deliberate.
We want to know if you just described the situation before the court and what the option of putting off redistricting until 2031 is.
What do people respond to that?
How do they know that?
When we've previously asked about nonpartisan redistricting a couple of years ago, it was very popular.
The point here is that Republicans about 75% say they don't want to redistrict.
About 72% of Democrats say they do.
Independence a little more don't.
But the messaging on redistricting simply has not penetrated to the public so that with a neutral question they automatically think of it in terms of partisanship and gerrymandering.
If they did, we'd probably see more Republicans opposed, but we'd also see more Democrats in Independence opposed.
That messaging just hasn't gotten through yet.
We've less than a minute with a big topic.
That is abortion.
In your poll, 57% of respondents oppose overturning Roe v. Wade.
35% favored that ruling.
This remains obviously a really tough place for Republican politicians.
We saw what happened in Ohio this week.
Voters approved abortion protections.
Does this issue continue to stay resonant through 2020?
I think the evidence is it does.
And this past Tuesday's election shows that what we see is about 57% favor abortion rights, about 35 opposed.
That's been pretty steady, somewhere close to a 60, 30, 35 split.
But a majority, two-thirds of Republicans favor overturning Roe, while 89% of Democrats favor returning to Roe, with Independence 60% favor returning to Roe.
That's the deep partisan divide, and also the party divide, if you think about the legislature.
All right.
Charles Ranklin, thanks very much.
Thank you.
Yeah, you're great.
So we're good.
Yeah, thanks.
And I don't know how much over did we go?
I don't know.