By admin 
A majority of California adults, 54%, say the state is headed in the wrong direction and an even higher majority, around 71%, expect bad economic times ahead, according to a new poll by the Public Policy Institute of California that captured voters’ gloomy outlooks ahead of the November elections.
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Pollsters found Democrat Xavier Becerra leading his Republican opponent by 22 percentage points in the race to be California’s next governor. Pollsters also surveyed likely voter attitudes toward a number of high profile ballot measure initiatives, including Proposition 40, the one time tax on billionaires. A slim majority, 51%, of likely voters said they’d vote yes on the measure.
The polling comes as the Iran war stretches on and continues to drive spikes in gasoline prices, and most recently record-high prices for diesel fuel. It also comes as a stock market boom for Artificial Intelligence companies exacerbates the impacts of already rising wealth inequality, particularly in California’s Bay Area where many technology companies are based.
Californians see the state as divided between the haves and have-nots, according to the survey. PPIC’s pollsters found 70% of adults view the state through that lens. Though 55% of those adults consider themselves among the haves, 58% of respondents also told pollsters recent price increases were causing them financial hardship.
African American and Latino adults were feeling the squeeze the most. Sixty-four percent and 68% of adults in those racial groups say they’re feeling squeezed, while only 46% of Asian Americans and 52% of white Californians said the same.
Newsom maintains slim approval. Californians despise federal electeds
Going into his last months in office, Gov. Gavin Newsom maintains the favorable opinion of a slim majority of voters and outpaced the state’s solons. Fifty-one percent of adults told pollsters they approve of his job performance, while just 45% said the same about the California Legislature.
In Democrat-leaning California, disdain for President Donald Trump outpaces that of a nation that has widely soured on the president. Seventy-six percent of adults told pollsters they disapprove of his job performance. The New York Times’ tracker of daily polling on the president’s popularity put disapproval nationwide at 58% on Tuesday. In California, only 17% of adults said they approved of the job the U.S. Congress, which is run by Republicans, is doing.
But poll respondents weren’t particularly cheerful about the ideas of Democrats either, or of Democratic Socialists, who have been much in the news of late. Forty-one percent of likely voters believe the Democratic Party has “a lot of” or “some” good ideas, and an even lesser figure, 29%, think so of Republicans. Democratic socialist-identifying politicians also didn’t score well — only 37% of likely voters liked their ideas.
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“Californians are clearly grumpy and aren’t enamored with any particular political party or movement,” PPIC polling chief Mark Baldassare said in a news release announcing the new survey.
“Across gender, race, and income level, voters seem skeptical of what Democrats, Republicans, and democratic socialists are offering,’ Baldassare said.
Ballot measures
Pollsters also asked voters about some of the long list of propositions on the state ballot, which according to PPIC features the most of such measures since 2016. The 14 propositions are too many for voters, 77% of them told PPIC.
While the billionaire tax held a slim majority, so did two other measures on the ballot that would each, if passed, counteract the tax. Proposition 41, which is pitched as a government transparency measure requiring auditor approval for new tax proposals but would nullify the billionaire tax, carried 51% of voters in the poll, against 44% no and 5% undecided. Meanwhile 54% of voters polled said they’d vote yes on Proposition 42, which prohibits new taxes on personal property. Forty-three percent of voters would go against it and 4% did not know.
PPIC also polled voters on Proposition 45, which would streamline approval for certain building projects under the California Environmental Quality Act, by putting deadlines on government agencies and the courts to issue approvals or rejections, among other changes. A slim majority, 49%, of likely voters said they’d vote yes, while 46% said no and 5% said they were undecided.
A coalition of environmental and public health groups have mounted an increasingly vocal campaign against Proposition 45, which for its part found deep-pocketed backers among the state’s technology executives and industry groups.
Fifty-five percent of likely voters also said they’d reject Proposition 39, which would require voters to present government-issued identification to vote. A majority of Republicans, 85%, supported that measure, but only 19% of Democrats and 43% of independent voters.
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