Poll: Voters Tiring Of Newsom, Yet May Not Really Want Change

SACRAMENTO, California — Most California voters rate Gavin Newsom’s tenure governing California as “poor” or “fair” and want his successor to take the state in a different direction, according to a new Citrin-POLITICO poll.

Yet Xavier Becerra, another mainstream Democrat who was among the gubernatorial candidates to most effusively praise Newsom during the primary, is on track to beat Republican Steve Hilton by a 20-point margin, according to the survey. The results suggest a disconnect between voters expressing desire for policy change, but picking a candidate more similar to the status quo.

“Becerra basically wins everyone — the third of the electorate that wants to continue the policies — and picks up nearly a third of those who want change,” said Jon Cohen, founder and CEO of TrueDot, whose firm fielded the poll.

Just 36% of registered voters characterize Newsom’s performance over the last eight years as “good” or “excellent,” according to the survey, and only 28% would like to see the next governor continue his policies.

“If you look at the evaluations of him going out, they're not all that positive,” said Jack Citrin, a University of California, Berkeley, political science professor and co-director of the UC Berkeley Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research-POLITICO poll.

The tepid views of Newsom’s performance in his home state add to concerns from Democrats elsewhere about whether his record will, if he runs for president, be a liability on the campaign trail. They also come as California voters have soured on the idea of Newsom running for president, according to another recent Citrin-POLITICO survey.

But a strong majority of California Democrats and Democratic-leaning registered voters — 61% — said they would be excited for a Newsom presidential bid, according to that survey, while 39% would not be. Democrats were less keen on former Vice President Kamala Harris, with a 55% majority saying they would not be excited for her to run. Newsom’s approval rating was 51% in a recent survey from the Public Policy Institute of California, a few points higher than the California Legislature’s.

“Gavin Newsom overwhelmingly won five elections in eight years and is the most popular outgoing Governor in the history of PPIC polling the question," Newsom spokesperson Izzy Gardon said in a statement. "It’s a shame America’s Favorite Governor can’t run for another term — he’d crush it!”

Newsom received his strongest marks on climate change in the new survey, where more voters said he had done well than poorly. His weakest reviews were on housing and homelessness: Just 28% said he had done a good job on housing and 25% on homelessness. Nearly three in four voters said he had not handled homelessness well.

Newsom fared somewhat better on the issue of artificial intelligence — a dominant issue in the runup to the 2028 race for the White House — with 35% of voters thinking he had done well compared to 43% who thought he hadn’t.

The survey also found a sharp divide between registered voters and POLITICO’s audience of key political and policy influencers in the state, including political staffers, lobbyists, policy advisers and others deeply versed in California’s political landscape. A slight majority of influentials — respondents more likely to have worked on state policy during the last eight years — thought Newsom did well overall during his tenure. They also had more positive views of his handling of every policy issue area, including climate, state spending, taxes and AI.

These data come from parallel surveys of California voters and policy influencers, fielded by TrueDot, the AI-accelerated research platform, in collaboration with the Citrin Center at UC Berkeley and POLITICO. Interviews for the voter survey were conducted online in English and Spanish from Oct. 9-14, among a sample of 1,149 registered voters, including 909 likely voters, selected at random through Verasight, with supplemental online panel recruitment. Voter results were weighted to California registered-voter benchmarks for age, educational attainment, race and ethnicity, gender, and geography, with additional calibration to 2024 presidential vote by region.

From Oct. 14-16, a parallel study was conducted in partnership with POLITICO among its audience of key political and policy influencers in California. The audience was defined based on job title and organizational affiliation and included state and local government employees, political staffers, lobbyists, policy advisers, consultants, business decision-makers and subject matter experts.

The margin of error is plus or minus 3.2% for the registered voter sample and plus or minus 3.6% for likely voters. The influencer survey has no calculable error margin.