CA120: Is Newsom mounting a turnaround?

Looking at the last month, it seems Newsom is capturing attention with his new media strategy, and building momentum with his push for mid-decade redistricting. Of course, much of this excitement and enthusiasm has been online and in podcasts – both of which can be different than what is translating down to real California voters.

To dig into this, we conducted a resurvey of voters who we had completed one of our polls earlier this year for other Capitol Weekly stories. In those surveys we found Newsom’s favorable ratings to be faltering, with a net negative fav/unfav of -5%, but in our most recent polling, conducted September 1-3, we see a significant pop back to favorable at +8%.

Gavin Newsom Fav/Unfav

What is most striking about these shifts – beyond the net 13-point gain in net favorability for Newsom, is the strength of the “very favorable” from 19% to 30%.

Looking more closely, we can actually dig into the voters who gave responses like “very favorable” and see how many of them stuck with this answer, or shifted to something else. In the following table, the rows represent the original survey responses, where the columns are the responses from this most recent survey.

These 569 respondents who were re-surveyed on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s favorability offers a revealing look at how voter sentiment can shift — or harden — over time.

To begin, there is a stability of intensity at the extremes. Among those who originally said they were “Very Favorable” toward Newsom, 87% reaffirmed that view in the retest. Fewer than 3% slid into unfavorable territory, suggesting that Newsom’s strongest supporters remain largely locked in. And the same is true for the “Very Unfavorable,” with nearly 90% staying there, and only minimal leakage into softer categories. This is strong entrenched political polarization.

However, there is something interesting in the middle categories. Among voters who initially described themselves as “Somewhat Favorable,” a majority (53%) stayed in that camp. But more than a third (38%) hardened to “Very Favorable” — evidence that Newsom has in the last few months consolidated softer support into stronger backing. At the same time, a small but notable 10% drifted into the unfavorable side.

For those who began “Somewhat Unfavorable,” the movement was split: 35% stayed with “Somewhat Unfavorable”, but more, 34%, shifted upward to “Somewhat Favorable” and another 17% went all the way to “Very Favorable.” In the span of just a few months, a majority (51%) of voters who had said they were somewhat unfavorable have shifted to favorable.

Looking more closely at the subgroups, the biggest improvement for Newsom came among Democrats who had previously rated him as “somewhat favorable” but more than half of them retested at “very favorable” and Latinos made this shift 45% of the time. Older voters and white voters were more “sticky” meaning that their views were more consistent across the surveys.

And then, beyond this polling, there is some interesting shifting voter registrations, which can speak to the overall political environment, but in at least one case is potentially more correlated to these last few weeks of increased Newsom favorability.

Looking specifically at those who register to vote online – what PDI refers to as “active” registrations (in contrast with the “passive” automatic re-registrations that happen when a voter moves or goes to the DMV) we can see a significant bump in Democratic registrations after the first announcement from Governor Newsom that he was going to engage in a mid-decade redistricting, pushing back on Texas.

The most significant bumps came on August 8^th when he hosted Texas legislators in the Governor’s mansion, around August 15^th when the draft maps were released, and the following days when the state legislature came back into session and began hearing bills to advance the mid-decade redistricting to the ballot as Proposition 50.

Overall we see a general improvement in Democratic registration numbers since the inauguration – something we will continue to dig into leading up to the 2026 mid-term elections.  But looking more specifically at just what has happened these past several weeks, there are signs that what Newsom is doing could be the early signs of a shift in his overall popularity and Democratic organizing more broadly.