Which of the GOP contenders do voters see as most conservative?
Hint: It's a rare case where Democrats and Republicans agree.
With days until the Iowa caucuses, Donald Trump faces two main competitors for the GOP nomination—Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Governor and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley. In ideological terms, how do voters see the three of them, and what might that tell us about the dynamics of the race?
In 2016 and again in 2021, Georgetown University’s Hans Noel and I teamed up to measure the perceived ideologies of leading American politicians. In contrast to the dominant approach using roll-call votes, we provided political activists with pairs of high-profile politicians and asked them to tell us which of the two was the more liberal or conservative. Part of our motivation was that it’s far easier for respondents to evaluate a pair of observations than to rank dozens of people at once. We then used the Bradley-Terry method to order the politicians’ perceived ideologies on a single, continuous scale.
In new survey conducted between November 17th and 27th, 2023, we repeated the exercise with the polling firm YouGov—this time sampling ordinary adults alongside political activists. In all, we surveyed 1,500 American adults. Each respondent assessed six pairs of politicians drawn from a list of 47 people.
Let’s start with the 533 Republican respondents. As the first figure illustrates, Republicans ranked Ted Cruz as the single most conservative of the politicians we asked about. Ron DeSantis scored second most conservative, but his score was not meaningfully different than those of House Speaker Mike Johnson, Representative Jim Jordan, or former president Donald Trump. What we found in 2021 holds in 2023, too: Donald Trump’s rise has redefined who’s thought to be conservative, with Trump and some of his strong supporters among those perceived as furthest to the right.
It appears that in the eyes of Republicans, Trump and DeSantis don’t differ much with respect to ideology. That’s interesting partly because in our prior surveys, Noel and I documented how those who were opposed to Trump came to be seen as less conservative. (That finding even earned me some criticism from my state’s junior senator at the time, Patrick Toomey.) DeSantis’ strategy of running against Trump while avoiding directly criticizing him may have preserved his conservative image in Republicans’ eyes. In the very unlikely event that Trump were to drop out, DeSantis would be well positioned ideologically, as he’s thought to be similarly conservative to the front-runner.
Meanwhile, Nikki Haley is perceived as roughly in the middle of the Republicans, just below South Dakota’s Kristi Noem and on the conservative side of Kevin McCarthy, Tom Emmer, Mitch McConnell, and Mitt Romney. That McConnell is now perceived to be on the left side of the GOP caucus by Republicans is telling—and is yet more evidence of Trump’s power to re-orient perceptions of high-profile Republicans. McConnell joins a long line of other Republicans including former Senators Flake, Toomey, and Sasse as politicians whose very conservative voting records didn’t always translate into perceptions for today’s Republican voters. (See Senator Toomey? I’m not the one questioning your conservative bona fides.)
Like other surveys, our late-November survey found Trump dominating likely Republican primary voters’ support nationally, with 66% to DeSantis 13% (and Haley’s 8%, before her recent uptick). Republicans saw DeSantis and Trump as similar ideologically, so it’s a good bet Trump’s huge advantage over DeSantis wasn’t grounded in ideology, or in concerns that DeSantis was too liberal. That also may help explain why 38% of Trump supporters said DeSantis was their second choice, a far higher fraction than named any other candidate.
Democrats, however, rank some of these figures differently, as the second figure shows. For them, Ron DeSantis remains the second-most conservative of all figures (though Cruz falls to third place, replaced by Former Rep. Liz Cheney). Democrats view Donald Trump as somewhat closer to the center than Republicans, and they view Nikki Haley as among the least conservative of the Republican politicians we named.
Of the credible GOP candidates, Nikki Haley has an advantage when looking to the general election: Republicans view her as a mainstream conservative while Democrats view her as more moderate. If she were to win the GOP nomination, she would be well positioned to compete for more centrist voters. But that same perceived moderation may also be a liability as she looks to build support in the GOP primary. Already, the Trump campaign is hitting Haley on being too liberal on immigration and taxes.
Haley and DeSantis are busy attacking each other, each seeking to be the last viable contender left standing against Trump. But these results—along with evidence on voters’ second-choice preferences—suggest that DeSantis and Haley appeal to different wings of the GOP. If that’s true, both candidates might actually have something to gain from the other one’s presence in the race.