Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy narrowly topped Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as the best-performing candidate in Wednesday’s Republican debate, according to a poll commissioned exclusively for The Post.
The post-debate survey of 1,800 people by Leger found that 23% of self-identified GOP voters said Ramaswamy won the debate and 21% said DeSantis emerged victorious.
Former Vice President Mike Pence was a distant third, with 11% saying he gave the best performance.
“I think it’s interesting in the sense that you had one of the early front-runners, DeSantis, doing reasonably well, but you’ve also got a bit of an upstart coming in playing a bit of the outsider card,” Leger Executive Vice President Andrew Enns told The Post on Thursday evening.
The shadow of former President Donald Trump, however, looms large.
Of Republicans surveyed, 61% want to see the 77-year-old as the GOP nominee, nearly seven times the support given the next-highest polling contender, DeSantis (9%).
“No one’s gonna win this thing with Trump still a viable candidate,” Enns said.
However, with Ramaswamy generating buzz and earning positive debate reviews, Enns suggested that the 38-year-old “Woke, Inc” author could “start to encroach on the ballot in some of those early primaries, and create real problems for some of those who want to get into the later primaries.”
Enns noted that experienced candidates such as Pence, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley – who are polling in the single digits nationally and had hoped to make up some ground on Trump and DeSantis Wednesday night — were perhaps the biggest losers of the debate.
“I think they’re probably reflecting and going, ‘OK, we didn’t change our lot here.’ And I think that’s going to put a lot of pressure on them,” he said.
Only 7% of GOP voters picked Haley as the winner of the Milwaukee debate, 6% chose Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), 4% selected Christie, 4% thought former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson did best and 1% declared North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum the winner.
Fourteen percent of Republicans polled said “no one” was the debate winner.
Haley, who slammed Ramaswamy on his foreign policy chops and argued for finding areas of “consensus” on issues concerning abortion rather than imposing a federal ban, did best in the minds of Democrats who watched the debate, with 19% of Democrats saying she won the debate.
Scott and Burgum did the worst, according to Democrats polled, with only 1% picking them as the winners.
Twenty-five percent of Democrats said “no one” was the debate victor.
Overall, 29% of those surveyed watched at least some of the debate live, and 36% of Republicans watched at least some of the debate, which drew 12.8 million viewers to Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network combined — more than the last GOP forum held without Trump.
The majority of GOP voters polled, 63%, agreed with the 45th president’s decision not to participate in the debate. Even 36% of President Biden’s supporters agreed with the decision.
If Trump were to be the Republican nominee in 2024, the poll shows he would defeat Biden, 80, on Election Day.
In a head-to-head matchup, Trump received 44% support compared to Biden’s 41%, with 15% wanting to vote for someone else.
The Republican National Committee will hold its second presidential primary debate on Sept. 27 in Simi Valley, California at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute.
In the five weeks before that debate, Enns said, the candidates will “really need to hone their message,” especially those deemed to have performed poorly.
“I think they’ll look at this and say, ‘OK, you know, the primaries are coming up fast. We got to figure out how we’re going to stay in this thing,’ ” he said.
Leger’s survey, weighted according to age, gender, region, education, ethnicity, number of people in the household and past vote, had a 2.3 percentage point margin of error.
