California Attorney General Kamala Harris is by far the top choice of the minority of Californians who have tuned in to next year’s U.S. Senate race, a new Field Poll finds.
With 58 percent of likely voters in June 2016’s open primary still expressing no opinion, 19 percent favor Harris while 8 percent favor Rep. Loretta Sanchez, D-Santa Ana, who launched her campaign with a series of stumbles last week.
Republicans fare worse, with state Assemblyman Rocky Chavez, R-Oceanside, at 6 percent and former state GOP chairman Tom Del Beccaro, of Lafayette, at 5 percent, according to the poll of 801 likely voters conducted April 23 through Saturday.
“What’s really striking to me is the huge undecided 58 percent of voters who really haven’t been paying much attention — it’s been a huge insiders’ game to this point,” Field Poll Director Mark DiCamillo said.
Among those who expressed candidate preferences, “you can see some very clear and distinct lines of support,” he said. And as more voters start paying attention, he added, “I would expect these kinds of trends to continue.”
That, he said, includes “hyper-partisanship” in which practically no voters are voicing support for a candidate outside their own party. It also includes massive support for Harris among African-Americans and more moderate support for Sanchez among Latinos.
Harris entered the race in January just days after U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., announced she wouldn’t seek another term, and Harris racked up dozens of endorsements and $2.5 million in the year’s first quarter.
Sanchez had a tough time getting out of the gate last week. A premature mass email tipped reporters to her impending campaign launch, which she and her staffers at first denied but then confirmed. And Sanchez made the wrong kind of headlines at the California Democratic Party convention last weekend in Anaheim by ad-libbing a Native American whooping “war cry” during a speech to the party’s Indian-American caucus.
DiCamillo said the new poll shows that Sanchez — “if she doesn’t implode in her own campaign — has probably an even chance to be the number-two finisher as compared to the Republicans, which would make it a very different kind of November election.”
If the general election is a choice between two Democrats, each will have to spend a lot of time, money and effort wooing the 57 percent of voters who aren’t Democrats. But if it’s a more traditional Democrat-Republican matchup, Democrats’ 15-percent registration edge could prove insurmountable.
But overall, Harris is sitting pretty, DiCamillo said. “This is not a bad news poll for Harris even though huge numbers are undecided — she has the resources to expand her base.”
The poll of likely voters, with has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points, found scant support for two candidates still exploring whether to enter the race: 3 percent for Rep. Xavier Becerra, D-Los Angeles, and 1 percent for former California Republican Party Chairman Duf Sundheim of Los Altos Hills.
Harris fared best (31 percent) among likely voters in the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area, where she’s been on the scene longer as a former San Francisco district attorney. Sanchez’s support is greatest (18 percent) among likely voters in Southern California, where she first was elected to Congress in 1996.
The poll also asked likely voters for their second-choice preferences. When combining first and second choices, Harris’ support rose to 22 percent, Sanchez’ to 14 percent, Chavez’ to 7 percent and Del Beccaro’s and Becerra’s to 6 percent.
This might be the “more realistic” measure given the state’s “top two” primary system, said political expert Larry Gerston, a San Jose State University professor emeritus.
“Clearly Harris is the favorite and, as of that moment, Sanchez has a firm grip on second,” he said. “It’s early. People shouldn’t get too excited.
“But that said, you’d rather be in Kamala Harris’ place than anyone else’s.”
Daisy Williams, a 66-year-old Democrat from Concord, told the Field Poll she supports Harris and has no second-choice pick.
Running out the door Tuesday afternoon to vote in the East Bay’s hotly contested 7th State Senate District special election, Williams said her pick for next year’s U.S. Senate race was easy because “I don’t know anybody else who’s running.”
Josh Richman covers politics. Follow him at Twitter.com/Josh_Richman. Read the Political Blotter at IBAbuzz.com/politics.
