California Gov. Gavin Newsom. (Photo: Amir Aziz, via Shutterstock)IGS Survey: The latest Berkeley IGS Poll conducted online last week among over 10,000 registered voters finds just 46% approving of Newsom’s performance as governor, while 48% disapprove, 31% of whom disapprove strongly. This represents a big shift in public sentiment from last year when large majorities approved of the job Newsom was doing.
A vehicle for Lyft and Uber awaits customers in Redwood City. (Photo: Sundry Photography, via Shutterstock)Proposition 22 has ignited the most expensive ballot proposition fight in California history, exemplifying the emerging 21st century battle of traditional employment-vs.-the gig economy. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is poised to weigh in.
California's state Capitol in Sacramento, home of the goverrnor's office and Legislature (Photo: Shutterstock)IGS Poll: As Gov. Gavin Newsom approached the mid-point of his term as governor, the Berkeley IGS Poll asked California registered voters for their opinions of the job Newsom has been doing both overall and across a wide range of issues that voters feel are important for the state to be addressing. The results indicate that Californians offer a very positive overall assessment of the Governor’s performance, but give him lower marks in a number of specific areas.
Casting a ballot in California. (Photo: Vepar5, via Shutterstock)Literally minutes after Donald Trump’s election in 2016, political pundits, consultants and prospective candidates started a march toward the mid-term elections. The expectations were set extremely high, with Democratic hopes of taking back the House of Representatives led, in part, by a huge gain in the limited number of remaining Republican-held congressional seats in California.
A powerful wave on a storm-tossed ocean. (Image: Andrey Polivanov, via Shutterstock)California is at the epicenter of what could be a Democratic wave, and that’s amazing. In this election cycle, we are seeing something really astounding, yet many are treating it as if it was normal. Californians are poised to give Democrats anywhere from two to five — or even more — of the 24 Republican congressional seats across the country that Democrats need to win control of the House of Representatives.
With California voters turning increasingly to the mail box to cast their ballots, five counties have set up an expanded vote-by-mail system for this year’s elections. Sacramento, Madera, Napa, Nevada and San Mateo are swapping out more than 500 neighborhood polling places and replacing them with nearly 80 high-tech “vote centers.”
Mark DiCamillo at the offices of the Institute for Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley. (Photo: IGS)To anyone who follows California politics, Mark DiCamillo is a familiar name indeed. He directed the Field Poll for decades, and he now heads the Berkeley IGS Poll at the Institute for Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley. He sat down with Capitol Weekly’s John Howard and Tim Foster to talk about the latest trends in opinion surveying and how these may play out this election year.
An image depicting the varied responses in political polling. (Illustration: Tim Foster/Capitol Weekly),ANALYSIS: The public opinion polling industry in many ways is at a crossroads. For years public polls were run with live telephone interviews using a system of “random digit dialing” or RDD, which allowed a poll to be based on samples which would be naturally balanced since all potential voters had the same probability to be administered a phone survey.
The attitudes of voters. Illustration by Niroworld, via Shutterstock.Field-IGS Poll: Nearly a quarter of likely voters in the poll (23%) said they were intending to vote Yes on both death penalty measures, even though they have opposite aims. This may partially be due to confusion about the intent of Prop. 66, or simply that some voters want to change the status quo of how the state now handles death penalty cases, regardless of how it’s done.
Image by Tim Foster, Capitol WeeklyOne of the state’s most respected polls has begun incorporating online surveys for the first time, underscoring the increasing difficulty of relying on telephone questioning. The Field Poll, which was founded in 1947, started using online surveys to gather voter opinion on nine of the 17 statewide ballot propositions that will appear on the Nov. 8 ballot.