Final polls leading up to Prop. 50 reveal promising outlook for supporters
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Two polls released last week both are hinting that Gov. Gavin Newsom’s push to pass
Proposition 50 will be successful.
According to
a poll released last Thursday from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, co-sponsored by the LA Times, six out of 10 likely voters support Prop. 50, the Nov. 4 statewide ballot measure that would redraw California’s congressional districts and give Democrats a boost toward regaining control of the House.
A large portion of those answers are “extremely partisan,” the survey pointed out, with about 93% of Democrats saying they would vote in favor, and a similar number of Republicans saying they would vote against it.
The survey found that the “yes” vote was mostly coming from two of the largest urban areas in the state: Los Angeles County and the San Francisco Bay Area, which collectively contain half the state’s voters. In San Diego County, six in 10 voters said they are likely to vote in favor of the measure.
Meanwhile, in other less-Democratic leaning regions including the Central Valley, Inland Empire and Orange County, the vote is evenly split, according to the poll. The measure has been polling particularly well with women, younger voters and Black and Asian American voters, although it’s received support across the board of all gender, age and ethnic groups.
So far, more than
6.4 million Californians have already voted early, a considerably higher return in early voting compared with
years past. President Donald Trump
urged Republicans not to cast their votes early and to rather cast their “no” votes in person.
Among the 33% of voters in that poll who had not yet cast their ballots a week before the election, 57% of them said they’d cast a “yes” vote, while 40% said they intended to vote “no.”
Nearly $160 million has been poured into the Yes on 50 campaign. That figure is a generous overspending compared with
two opposition committees that raised
a fraction of the total figure. The success of those efforts could very well be reflected in the UC Berkeley poll, which found that 71% of respondents said they had received substantial information about the ballot measure.
Across the state, Californians have been targeted by numerous television ads.
Several state politicians, including Assemblymember Mark Gonzalez, a Democrat from Los Angeles, and Robert Rivas, the Assembly speaker who represents parts of the Central Valley, have made their pitches to their voters on why they should vote “yes” on Prop. 50.
Nationally recognized Democrats including New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, former President Barack Obama, and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren have also made the case that the measure is a way to directly oppose Trump and uphold democracy.
Republicans have been urging a “no” vote,
mostly trying to appeal to their own party and independent voters, calling to put aside politics and uphold the state’s existing bipartisan independent redistricting commission. That commission was passed by voters in 2008 and ensured that every 10 years congressional districts were determined based on census data.
Prop. 50 does not erase the commission, and the responsibility of drawing maps will go back to them in 2030. Perhaps the most famous Republican working against the Prop. 50 supporters is
former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who helped create that commission almost two decades ago.
The Berkeley poll yielded similar results to others that have come out
in recent weeks.
That includes one poll
published earlier in the week by the Public Policy Institute of California, which also found a healthy majority of Californians will vote in favor of the measure. That poll found a slightly smaller margin of voters who were likely to vote “yes” — 56% in contrast to 43% who said they opposed. There were 1,707 California adult residents polled, with a sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. The poll wasn’t solely about Prop. 50, in contrast to the UC Berkeley one, also asking respondents about cost of living and other affordability issues.
States across the country are in their own gerrymandering battles after Trump started the unprecedented mid-decade redistricting war in an attempt to maintain the GOP majority in the House of Representatives next year.
The redistricting battle began in Texas, when Trump asked the governor and the state Legislature to approve new maps that could gain Republicans five new seats in Congress. There, Republicans could grab 30 out of 38 congressional seats.
Also redrawing their maps are North Carolina, which became
the first swing state to do so and could win 11 of its 14 seats for Republicans, and Missouri, which
could gain one new seat with its new maps, though lawsuits are underway to push back on the legality of that move.
