Ahead of the primaries in Florida on Tuesday, the only public poll of the Democratic primary for Senate between Angie Nixon, a progressive state representative, and Alex Vindman, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, was retracted last month.
It was not much better in the other statewide contests, where polls have been few and far between. The lone exception came in the Republican primary for governor, where pollsters have released 20 surveys this year. Representative Byron Donalds, who has been endorsed by President Trump, led in all of them.
Mr. Donalds, who was already among the leading candidates in the race when polling began in 2024, has seen his lead reach as high as 46 percentage points in recent months. A 13-percentage-point lead in a July poll from The Political Matrix and The Listener Group represented the closest margin since February.
Mr. Donalds’s most formidable competition has come from three candidates, none of whom reached 20 percent in recent polling: Jay Collins, Gov. Ron DeSantis’s lieutenant governor; James Fishback, an investor whose social media statements have been characterized as racist and antisemitic; and Paul Renner, a former speaker of the state’s House of Representatives.
(Casey DeSantis, the state’s first lady, was more competitive with Mr. Donalds in polling conducted last summer, but decided against seeking the nomination. Neither she nor her husband, who is term-limited, has made an endorsement.)
In the Democratic primary for governor, David Jolly, a former Republican congressman, had a commanding lead in a poll conducted in July by Targoz Market Research and sponsored by the James Madison Institute. That was the only survey fielded since Jerry Demings, the mayor of Orange County, suspended his campaign. No candidate other than Mr. Jolly had support higher than 4 percent in the poll, but it did not include Dotie Joseph, a state representative and the only other current or former elected official in the race.
In addition to the statewide primaries, Florida has an assortment of competitive House races on Tuesday, which come in the wake of the state’s recent redistricting. Six of the state’s 28 incumbents are retiring, and several others have drawn notable primary challenges. Independent polls of these races have been sparse as well: Internal and candidate-affiliated polls made up around half of the publicly released surveys.
