Harris Leads Trump by a Wide Margin in California, Says New Berkeley IGS Poll

The findings are not surprising in her deep-blue home state. But the poll’s last report before the Nov. 5 election echoes a national trend: diminished support among Latinx and Asian American voters, especially men.

Vice President Kamala Harris holds a commanding 22-point lead in her home state over Republican Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential race, according to a new Berkeley IGS Poll released today.

While there’s no practical doubt that Harris will defeat Trump to win California’s 54 electoral votes, the poll echoes troubling trends for her campaign nationwide: diminished support among Latinx and Asian American voters, especially men.

The poll of likely voters and those who already have voted finds that Harris leads former president Trump 57% to 35%, with 3% favoring other candidates and 5% undecided. But four years ago, Democrat Joe Biden carried the state by 29 points, and IGS Poll Director Mark DiCamillo said his last voter survey before the election pointed to a “particularly striking” loss of support for the Democratic ticket among those two groups.

Harris remains “in a strong position in California, with roughly equal levels of support among its white, Latino and Asian American voters, and very high support among the state’s Black voters,” said Eric Schickler, co-director of the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS). “At the same time, her lower vote margins among Latino and Asian Americans, compared to what Biden received in 2020, speak to why the broader race across the country is likely to be so close.”

In the California U.S. Senate race, Democratic U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff was supported by 55% of those polled, compared to 34% for Republican Steve Garvey, a former Major League Baseball player.

In the presidential race, most polls show Trump and Harris locked in an extremely tight race to win 270 votes, and the presidency, in the Electoral College. But a number of reports have shown that a modest, but significant, number of voters of color were drifting from Harris and her historic candidacy as the first Black-South Asian woman to run for president on a major party ticket.

The IGS Poll reported that in the election four years ago, CNN exit polls found that three-quarters of the state’s Latino and Asian American voters backed Biden. Today, the new poll shows that 57% of Latinx voters and 56% of Asian Americans support Harris, compared to 77% of Black voters and 58% of white voters.

Only about half of Asian American and Latinx men are supporting the Democratic ticket, DiCamillo found.

However, the poll found a significant gender gap, with 62% of women overall favoring Harris, compared to 52% of California men. This, too, echoes polling and other reports of voting trends nationwide.

Measuring support across different age groups, Harris finds her strongest backing from voters under 30 (64%) and those 65 and older (60%).

The vice president has opened a remarkable 41-point gap among college-educated white voters, 67% to 26% for Trump. Among white voters who have not graduated from college, Trump leads 50% to 45%.

The IGS Poll also shows California voters, by a margin of 60% to 25%, overwhelmingly favor Proposition 36, a get-tough-on-crime measure that would authorize felony charges and longer prison sentences for repeat drug and theft offenders. Support is highest among Republicans and independents, but even among Democrats, nearly half of likely voters support it.

Support for Proposition 32, which would increase the minimum wage, has gained significant support, but is just below the 50% needed for passage, the voter survey found. The poll found that the more money voters earn, the less likely they are to support the higher minimum wage.

The latest Berkeley IGS Poll was conducted online from Oct. 22 to 29, in English and Spanish, among 4,341 Californians considered likely to vote or who had already voted in the state’s November general election. Funding for the poll was provided in part by the Los Angeles Times. The margin of error is about 2 percentage points.