by Mark DiCamillo
In the final weeks leading up to this year’s November mid-term elections, President Donald Trump encouraged voters across the country to vote as if he were on the ballot. When he said this, it got me to thinking what that might mean for voters here in California. After all, Trump had lost California in the 2016 presidential election by 30 percentage points. In addition, a statewide Berkeley IGS Poll completed about two weeks before the election showed the President’s job performance ratings among likely voters under water by 23 percentage points, with 61% disapproving and just 38% approving.
As the last of the state’s estimated 12.8 million votes are now finally being tallied, we have a clearer picture of the end result.
Not only did the Democrats retain 100 percent occupancy of all statewide offices, as of this writing they had also captured six GOP-held congressional districts and were close to flipping one more.* They also captured a handful of additional seats in the Assembly and State Senate providing them with bigger-than-ever supermajorities in both houses.
The extent of the GOP’s losses in the congressional elections was foreshadowed one month earlier, when the Berkeley IGS Poll was commissioned by the Los Angeles Times to conduct surveys of likely voters across eight Republican-held congressional districts in California – CA10, CA22, CA25, CA39, CA45, CA48, CA49, and CA50. It was an ambitious project requiring us to conduct eight simultaneous polls to meet the Times’ objective of assessing the relative vulnerability of GOP candidates in holding these seats.
The Berkeley IGS Poll carried out these surveys using a relatively new survey methodology that it had been employing in its polls over the past year. The polls were administered online by distributing emails to random samples of registered voters with email address appended to their voter record in English or Spanish, and in the 48th district, in Vietnamese as well. Each email invitation asked voters to participate in a non-partisan survey conducted by the University and provided a link to the IGS website where the survey was housed. Data collection spanned an eight-day period from September 16-23, 2018.
Sample listings were drawn from the voter file by Political Data, Inc., which partnered with IGS in its email polling the year. To obtain a proper balance of responses across major demographic segments of registered voters, the listings were stratified by age and gender, race/ethnicity and language from information on the voter file.
At the conclusion of data collection post-stratification weights were applied to the registered voter samples to further align them to each district’s overall voter characteristics. Likely voters were identified based on each voter’s stated intention to vote, their history of voting in past elections as reported on the voter file, or among newer registrants, their stated interest in voting in this year’s election. Over 5,000 likely voters were sampled across the eight districts, ranging from 527 to 912 voters per district.
The Times reported the results from the poll on page 1 in its Thursday, October 4, editions under Washington bureau chief David Lauter’s byline. The headline read:
Heavy risks for GOP in battleground races in state. New poll shows that in six most contested California House districts, Republicans hold a lead in none.
The Trump Effect
When analyzing the results, one common thread undergirded voter preferences in each district. There was a consistent and strong correlation between how voters viewed the job Trump was doing as President and whom they intended to vote for in their district. Among voters who approved of the job Trump was doing, about nine in ten supported the GOP candidate for Congress. Conversely, among voters who disapproved of the President’s performance, about nine in ten were supporting the Democratic candidate.
The problem for the GOP was that in six of the eight districts Trump’s job ratings were underwater, with majorities disapproving of the President’s performance. Not coincidentally, these were the same six districts that the Democrats successfully flipped in this year’s election. Below are the six districts captured by the Democrats to date, comparing Trump’s approval ratings and voter preferences in our late-September poll to election returns reported as of November 25th, when this article was prepared.
By contrast, in the two districts that the Republicans were able to hold in this cycle majorities of likely voters approved of the President’s performance. Trump’s approval rating and the voting preferences of likely voters as measured in our late-September poll are shown below, along with the district’s election returns as of November 25th.
The Trump effect also played a significant role in the overall statewide election, especially with regard to voter turnout. The estimated 12.8 million Californians who voted in this year’s mid-term is greater than 5 million more voters than voted in the state’s last mid-term election in 2014. This corresponds to a turnout of 65 percent of the state’s registered voters, the largest in a California mid-term election since 1982.
President Trump, of course, was not solely responsible for the big turnout. But, as one of the most polarizing political figures in modern American politics, he set the table for this eventuality, by giving California Democrats an historic opportunity that they fully exploited through well-financed and effective outreach campaigns to get their supporters to the polls.
Proposition 6
By contrast, the state Republican Party’s efforts to increase turnout rested largely on their qualifying an initiative, Proposition 6, on the November statewide ballot to repeal a recently enacted increase in the state’s gasoline taxes. Backers of Proposition 6 felt its presence on the ballot would draw larger numbers of Republican and conservative voters to the polls to vote to repeal the tax. However, the election returns and our pre-election Berkeley IGS Polls suggest this strategy didn’t pan out.
Not only was the gas tax repeal soundly defeated by an estimated fourteen percentage points statewide, our polls showed the issue was not generating much excitement among likely voters, even in the eight Republican-held congressional districts where the initiative was more popular. When our congressional district poll asked likely voters to rate the importance of twelve issues when voting in this year’s election, the gas tax repeal initiative ranked no higher than sixth among likely voters in any of the districts. According to the poll, more traditional issues like health care, the economy, immigration, taxes and gun laws were of greater concern to each district’s voters.
A New Low for the GOP
This year’s mid-term election results mark a new low for the state Republican Party, which not all that long ago held considerable sway over politics at both the state and national levels. After all, California launched the political careers of both Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and as recently as twenty years ago the GOP accounted for nearly half of the state’s congressional delegation. By contrast, Republicans will hold at most eight of the state’s 53-member House delegation in the next Congress, an historically small share.
In Sacramento, not only will the GOP continue to be without any representation among the state’s constitutional officeholders, the latest returns suggest that they will begin the 2019 legislative year with at most 20 members in the state Assembly (out of 80) and only 11 state senators (out of 40).
This outcome brings to mind a talk I gave during Barack Obama’s second term as president, in which I noted that judged solely from the results in state and congressional elections held during his tenure, his presidency ranked as one of the worst in memory for the Democratic Party nationally, since it was followed by so many election defeats across the country.
And, while we are only in the second year of the Trump presidency, judging from this year’s returns in California, it’s looking as if the same can be said for the presidency of Donald Trump and the effect he is having on election politics here in the Golden State.
Mark DiCamillo is director of the Berkeley IGS Poll at the University of California, Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS). Previously he served as director the non-partisan Field (California) Poll for more than 25 years. This article, from The Polling Report, is based on a November 19 talk he gave to the Sacramento Press Club.
More information about the Berkeley IGS Poll’s late-September 2018 congressional district polling, including press releases and topline findings, can be found at: https://igs.berkeley.edu/igs-poll/berkeley-igs-poll
* The outcome of the election in the state’s 21st congressional district remains too close to call, as of this writing. The 21st district was not included among the districts surveyed by the Berkeley IGS Poll.