A new poll shows that 54% of registered voters believe that Governor Gavin Newsom is focused on his own presidential ambitions, versus 26% who believe he is focused on his job and the state — a two-to-one margin.
The University of California Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS) poll, conducted in April among 6,201 voters, with a 2% margin of error, also found that Newsom’s approval and disapproval are at 46%.
A release accompanying the poll explained:
The survey … finds that Californians continue to hold very mixed and highly partisan views of the job Gavin Newsom is doing as governor, with equal proportions now reporting that they approve (46%) as disapprove (46%) of the Governor’s performance. Voters are also about evenly split when asked how confident they are in Newsom’s ability to be effective in looking out for California’s interests when dealing with the Trump administration, with 48% expressing confidence in the Governor and 45% saying they are not confident.
However, by a more than a two-to-one margin (54% to 26%), most voters believe that as Newsom serves out his final two years as governor, he is devoting more of his attention to things that might benefit himself as a possible candidate for president than to governing the state and helping to solve its problems.
Even 40% of Democrats believed that Newsom was focused on himself, as opposed to 40% who thought he was focused on his job.
Newsom reacted defensively this week after Trump said that the governor would never be president due to his failures on high-speed rail and the recent wildfires. Newsom’s office issued a press statement comparing California’s high-speed rail project to that of Texas — neither of which has been built.
“California’s system is under construction; Texas’ has yet to break ground,” the statement said, though California’s high-speed rail project is many years behind schedule and tens of billions of dollars over budget, and will not connect Los Angeles to San Francisco, much less in under three hours, as originally advertised.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
