SACRAMENTO >> Most Californians believe their state is moving in the right direction, but a majority believe the nation is headed down the wrong track, according to a new Field Poll.
The poll showed that 52 percent of Californians believe that the state is on the right track, compared with 39 percent who think it isn’t. In contrast, 54 percent of the state’s residents believe the nation is on the wrong track, and only 34 percent say that the nation is headed in the right direction.
Robert Huckfeldt, a political science professor at UC Davis, isn’t surprised. He said there is a “warm glow” in California because most of the state recovered so well from the Great Recession.
The state government, Huckfeldt said, is functioning more smoothly under the leadership of a popular governor —and the state’s economy also continues to expand as the benefits from Silicon Valley’s booming tech industry reverberate around the state.
At the same time, President Barack Obama and Congress are at loggerheads, the nation is facing an array of foreign policy headaches, and media coverage of national issues is significantly more negative than coverage of California, said Jack Citrin, a political science professor at UC Berkeley.
“The state government seems to be doing its basic jobs,” said Mark DiCamillo, director of the Field Poll. “It’s passing laws, it’s attending to issues that are important to Californians … whereas when they look at Washington they see gridlock.”
The poll also shows a dramatic difference along party lines. Among Democratic voters, 66 percent think California is moving in the right direction, and 44 percent think the same about the United States. At the same time, only 29 percent of Republicans see California as moving in the right direction, and 14 percent of Republicans say this about the country overall.
“When Democrats in California look across the country, they see Republicans controlling the House and Senate and Republicans blocking Obama’s nomination for the ninth seat in the Supreme Court,” Huckfeldt said. “There’s certainly a partisan complexion to people’s responses to these questions.”
Californians haven’t always been so optimistic.
In the thick of the mess created by the Great Recession, California voters had incredibly negative views about the state. In 2010, a measly 13 percent of California voters surveyed by the Field Poll thought that California was headed in the right direction.
Political experts note that Gov. Jerry Brown was faced with a staggering $26 billion deficit when he took office in January 2011, but managed to close the gap and create a budget surplus by getting voters to increase taxes, enacting modest pension reform and reallocating funds toward education.
Since 2011, the percentage of California voters who see their state as headed down the right track has jumped steadily. And the figure hasn’t been nearly this high since 2000 (when the “right direction” response peaked at 58 percent). That was just before the dot.com bubble popped and when voters were still basking in the robust economy of the late ‘90s, said Laura Stoker, another UC Berkeley political science professor.
The Field Poll surveyed 560 registered voters in California from June 8 to July 2. The survey’s maximum margin of error is plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.
The poll also shined a light on California’s regional differences: 65 percent of Bay Area voters believe California was moving in the right direction, while 49 percent of voters residing in inland counties say that California is seriously off track.
Coastal voters tend to be more Democratic, whereas inland voters tend to be more evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, DiCamillo said.
“Over 70 percent of the state’s voters live in a county that touches the San Francisco Bay or Pacific Ocean, and they are very optimistic about the direction of the state as compared to the voters who live in the inland counties,” DiCamillo said. “There are 38 inland counties, but they only represent a quarter of the state’s voters, and they look at the state as going down the wrong track.”
