He’s got a looooong way to go before he even gets through his first legislative session, much less his first year or term. But so far, the evidence is overwhelming that most Florida voters believe Gov. Ron DeSantis is making smart decisions as the head of the nation’s largest swing state.
On Thursday, Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy released the latest poll showing that, following a contentious and often acrimonious campaign, DeSantis has built up good will during his first three months in office. His approval rating is at a striking 62 percent according to the poll, conducted from March 18 to 20 .
Perhaps even more striking, Mason-Dixon found that some 53 percent of voters in heavily Democratic South Florida say they support what DeSantis has done since his election in November following a hard-fought and contentious race with Andrew Gillum. And registered Democrats are split on how they feel about him, with 41 percent approving and 41 percent opposing, according to the poll.
The Mason-Dixon poll queried 625 voters by phone, and has a margin of error of 4 percent. In January, two weeks after DeSantis was sworn in, the same pollster found that 48 percent of voters approved of how DeSantis was handling himself – a noted spike in a favorability rating that Mason-Dixon had found in the high 30s during the campaign.
Mason-Dixon’s latest poll echoes the findings of other recent polls.
Last month, Quinnipiac released a poll that pegged DeSantis’ approval rating at 59 percent, significantly better than either his predecessor, Rick Scott, or Florida’s other U.S. Senator, Marco Rubio. That came after a Saint Leo University poll put DeSantis’ approval rating at 64 percent, and Bendixen & Amandi International put it at 50 percent.
The gaps in those numbers are significant. And those polls don't take into account a new flap over DeSantis' controversial pick to lead Florida's health agencies, and can't take into account the most bruising portion of the ongoing legislative session when most the work of the state government will be conducted.
But the constant thread through all of them is that DeSantis is at this point the most popular statewide politician in Florida, and that overall a majority of voters believe he’s doing a good job.
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