Polls aren’t cheering to some GOP incumbents
Polls in a pair of Southern California congressional races that show voters unwilling to re-elect to GOP incumbents could be bad news for Republicans across the state.
The separate polls, done by the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley, found a majority of voters disinclined to cast their ballots for Rep. Steve Knight, R-Lancaster (Los Angeles County), and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Costa Mesa (Orange County).
But those results may spread far outside those district boundaries, since they track closely with voter disapproval of President Trump and general unhappiness with Republican control of Congress.
“Voters are looking as much at Washington” as they are at the candidate in their district, said Mark DiCamillo, the poll’s director. “There’s a really strong linkage with what’s happening in Washington and how people are
going to vote.”
It hasn’t typically been that way. In 2016, a Gallup Poll taken a month before the November election found that Congress had a job approval rating of about 20 percent. Yet 98 percent of the incumbents running for re-election, Republicans and Democrats alike, were returned to office. In that election, like those in many years before, polls found that while voters disliked Congress as a whole, they were willing to give their own representative a pass.
But maybe not this year.
In Rohrabacher’s district, where Republicans hold a 43 percent-to-30 percent registration margin over Democrats, 51 percent of likely voters said they were disinclined to vote for the 14-term incumbent, compared with 41 percent who favored his re-election.
The so-called enthusiasm gap is even wider, with 28 percent of likely voters strongly inclined to vote for Rohrabacher and 44 percent strongly convinced they will not support him.
It’s a similar situation for Knight, magnified by the fact that in his once strongly Republican district in northern Los Angeles County, Democrats now have a 41 percent-to-36 percent registration edge.
After winning a tough re-election campaign in 2016, Knight now finds that 56 percent of his district’s likely voters don’t support him, compared with 38 percent who do. Only 27 percent enthusiastically back his re-election, while 50 percent of those voters are strongly disinclined to vote for him.
Polling suggests that Trump, his policies and his GOP congressional supporters bear at least part of the blame for the poor showings by Rohrabacher and Knight.
“Republicans are running for re-election into a headwind,” DiCamillo said.
In Rohrabacher’s Republican-heavy district, 53 percent of likely voters disapprove of Trump’s job performance, and they split, 47 percent to 47 percent, on whether GOP control of Congress is a good thing. Nearly two-thirds support providing legal status to immigration “Dreamers,” young people brought to the country illegally by their parents; 53 percent are opposed to a border wall; and 49 percent don’t like the new tax plan, numbers all the opposite of Trump’s positions.
For Knight’s district, 55 percent are unhappy with Trump, and 56 percent oppose GOP control of Congress. On policy questions, 64 percent back legal status for “Dreamers,” 55 percent oppose the border wall and 54 percent don’t like Trump’s tax plan.
None of this means the two incumbents don’t have GOP support. For Knight, 78 percent of Republicans back his re-election, a number that slips only slightly to 73 percent for Rohrabacher. But with an overwhelming 90 percent of Democrats and 60 percent of independent voters opposed, their campaigns face tough sledding.
“Republicans should be worried about the effect Trump is having on California,” said DiCamillo, noting that a December poll found that nearly two-thirds of the state’s registered voters disapproved of the president’s job performance. “There’s an undercurrent that what’s happening in Washington is negatively affecting California.”
The two polls were based on random email surveys conducted from Jan. 11-21. In Rohrabacher’s 48th Congressional District, it included 1,310 likely voters with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.0 percentage points. In Knight’s 25th Congressional District, the poll included 977 likely voters and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.3 percentage points.
John Wildermuth is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jwildermuth@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jfwildermuth