Jack Posobiec and Raheem Kassam discussed the gradual decline of Republican presidential candidate and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis over the summer in the polls. While DeSantis was initially considered a primary conservative challenger to former President Donald Trump, he significantly slipped in the polls.
Posobiec showed a previous clip of Kassam from June, predicting that by mid-summer, DeSantis polling numbers would drop to around 10 percent. As it happens, Kassam’s prediction was spot on, with DeSantis currently polling at exactly 10 percent.
“Okay, we’ve got it [the poll] up there today,” Posobiec said. “In this poll, not only is Ron DeSantis [at] ten percent … It’s actually perfect.” He also mentioned that Vivek Ramaswamy is polling at 11.4 percent.
“How did this happen? And not only that, [did you] know that this was going to happen?”
“There are a couple of things you need to bear in mind,” Kassam said. “The first thing to bear in mind here is we always look at sample sizes. There’s a two-thousand-person poll, which [make it] about double the sample size of most of the daily tracking polls that you get.” He then said that it’s important to look at the margin of error, which, for the poll in question, was at 2.6 percent.
Kassam noted that it was also important to consider the credibility of the organization carrying out the polling. The polling group, Cygnal, has Brock McCleary as its vice president, who was a pollster for the Trump campaign in 2020. He has since become a pollster for Ramaswamy’s campaign. As a result, Kassam noted it was important to take Ramaswamy’s polling numbers with a “pinch of salt.”
“But in the grand scheme of things, the trajectory is correct,” Kassam said. He said there was a consistent trend of DeSantis’ numbers going down, from the mid-20s, “then 15, then 12, now we’re at ten, it keeps [going] further and further down.”
“So you know, you can have some skepticism about this, as I do every data set that comes out, whether it's attached to a campaign, a PAC, or independent. And there's no real such thing as independent polling companies – maybe you would say Rasmussen is the closest thing you'll get to that. But you'll start to see this number creep up more and more, and you'll start to see, I think, Single-Digit-Midget Ron” will continue to fall in the polls.
