New polling data show former President Donald Trump is gaining favor with the nation’s wealthiest voters as the impacts of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis‘ culture war have begun to spread against private sector industries like agriculture and construction.
However, the GOP appears to be increasingly losing its grip on America’s wealthiest individuals, with most saying their support—like previous elections—will likely be placed firmly behind the Democratic candidate.
According to a newly released CNBC survey of America’s millionaires, DeSantis’ support among upper-crust conservatives has fallen from 54 percent to 32 percent among millionaire Republicans since last December, while Trump—whom many shunned in 2016 and 2020—has seen his support jump by nearly a dozen points among millionaires since the end of 2022, leaving him just four points behind his chief rival in the 2024 Republican primaries. The CNBC survey, which was conducted online in April, had a total of 764 respondents, each of whom reported $1 million or more of investable assets, according to the website’s criteria.
Part of that might be wishful thinking on their part: most expect Trump to be the party’s nominee and, in a head-to-head race between Biden and Trump, millionaires still favor Biden by a near-10 point margin, closely tracking with millionaires’ increasing propensity to support Democrats dating back to the 2000s in past surveys by outlets like CNBC and Forbes.
Given data from institutions like Grinnell College showing the average Republican voter boasting higher average incomes than Democrats, DeSantis’ sliding favorability with conservative millionaires could prove problematic as the state reckons with the economic fallout of his aggressive “anti-woke” policies.
Highly regarded by the state’s business community in a 2021 survey by the Florida Chamber of Commerce, DeSantis’ brand has grown increasingly polarizing as he seeks to court a plurality of the Republican electorate ahead of the 2024 primaries. Some of the policies he’s pursued to accomplish that, however, have already made an impression.
A national poll from Yahoo News and YouGov in early May found a slim majority of Americans—albeit just 16 percent of Republicans—opposed the DeSantis administration’s retaliation against entertainment giants Disney for criticizing Florida’s controversial 2022 “Don’t Say Gay” bill limiting discussion of LGBTQ+ topics in classrooms. Another Siena College poll conducted last fall found just 34 percent of Florida voters approved of DeSantis’ so-called “Stop WOKE” Act, which prohibited largely popular initiatives boosting diversity, equity and inclusion in the state’s classrooms and workplaces.
More recently, a statewide mandate on private employers to engage in a program to verify their employees’ citizenship status has already begun to backfire, prompting concerns from some policymakers amid a burgeoning exodus of laborers already being reported in pockets of the agricultural and construction sectors.
While generally popular with voters as a measure to reduce the number of undocumented migrants in the workforce, recent projections by the center-left Florida Policy Institute suggested the state’s most labor-intensive industries could lose 10 percent of their workforce as a result of the new mandate, costing the state as much as $12.6 billion dollars in economic activity.
Some of DeSantis’ legislative efforts have sparked concerns from business leaders DeSantis could use the power of the state to limit their decisions.
Digital-trading billionaire Thomas Peterffy, for example, recently paused his financial support of DeSantis over his policies in April, later sending a $1 million check to the more moderate Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin in Virginia, according to Politico. Another top donor, John Catsimatidis, abandoned his support of DeSantis shortly after, though his reasoning stemmed from an alleged lack of access to the candidate. Meanwhile, Biden, who regularly courted wealthy supporters on the 2020 campaign trail, has already earned the pledged support of wealthy benefactors like media mogul Haim Saban and DreamWorks cofounder Jeffrey Katzenberg, who currently serves as a co-chair for Biden’s re-election campaign.
However, there is an upside there for DeSantis. While so-called “elites” were largely turned off by the decision internal poll numbers shared with outlets like The Messenger earlier this week suggested that large swaths of the GOP base approved of his decision to target businesses like Disney who back inclusive policies—a key wedge for him as he seeks to gain footing within the base against the more popular candidate in Trump.
Republicans, meanwhile, have largely lost ground with the millionaire class as their dollars have begun gravitating toward liberal politicians with well-educated bases of support. In return, presidential candidates since notably anti-union Democrat Bill Clinton have begun adopting more business-friendly policy positions, suggesting shifting priorities that have led Republicans to embrace messaging rooted in economic populism.
“While Obama and congressional Democrats did pass the Affordable Care Act and Biden and congressional Democrats did pass large spending on COVID-19 stimulus and physical infrastructure in 2021, the Democrats at the head of the party have not meaningfully altered the policy agenda in ways that would threaten the interests of affluent Americans,” Sam Zacher, a Yale Ph.D. candidate and a contributor for liberal blog Common Dreams wrote in a 2023 research paper published by Cambridge University Press.
Affluent Americans’ allegiances, meanwhile, have remained steadfast. In the lead-up to the 2016 elections, Ipsos survey data showed Democrat Hillary Clinton as the preferred candidate of wealthy Americans by a rate of nearly two-to-one while, in 2020, CNBC survey data showed a majority of millionaires were more likely to support Biden than Trump in the general election.
Current CNBC data suggests a similar trend: Facing one another in a general election, an estimated 55 percent of millionaires would support Biden compared to just 45 percent who would favor Trump.
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