Governor candidates barnstorm the state
From the Mexican border to a Palm Springs senior center to an Oakland soul food restaurant, the candidates for California governor rushed to meet voters in the final days before next week’s primary.
A new poll released Thursday magnified the high stakes: Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and Republican businessman John Cox pulling further ahead of former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, even as an outside group supporting Villaraigosa poured more than $2 million into last-minute ads blasting Newsom for skipping out on his job.
The poll, from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, put Newsom at 33 percent, Cox at 20 percent and Villaraigosa at 13 percent among likely voters. The top two candidates will go on to the general election. This will likely be the last major independent survey released before people vote Tuesday morning.
Newsom continued a swing on his campaign bus, visiting senior centers in San Diego and Palm Springs on Thursday with his family in tow. He was scheduled to visit a Ladera Heights barbershop Thursday evening.
After meeting immigration activists at the U.S.-Mexican border on Wednesday, Villaraigosa started a 24-hour tour of the Los Angeles area on Thursday. He shook voters’ hands at transit stations, made sandwiches at a popular deli, and dished up taco salad at a soup kitchen.
In Fresno, Cox met with onetime GOP presidential hopeful and pizza magnate Herman Cain. And Republican Assemblyman Travis Allen, who’s resisted calls from some GOP officials to drop out after President Donald Trump endorsed his rival, held his own rally at the border wall earlier this week.
Farther north, State Treasurer John Chiang stuck to the Bay Area. He visited the downtown Oakland headquarters of The Greenlin------
ing Institute, a social justice group, before getting a private lunch at iconicWest Oakland soul food restaurant Brown Sugar Kitchen (which recently closed to the public). This afternoon, he’ll visit local businesses in San Francisco’sWest Portal neighborhood.
Chiang, who clocked in at 9 percent in the IGS poll, talked about his advocacy for criminal justice reform and shared stories of his upbringing as the son of working- class immigrants. “I was probably the only 11-year- old who was really excited about theWatergate hearings,” he said.
In a brief interview, he also took a shot at Newsom for his campaign strategy of boosting Cox in an effort to guarantee a Republican opponent in the general election.
“You can’t advocate that you’re leading the charge against President Trump yet pushing for a candidate supported by President Trump,” Chiang said of Newsom. “You’re arguing out of both sides of your mouth.” In contrast, he called himself “the antiTrump.”
Meanwhile, Delaine Eastin, the former state schools chief, was scheduled to kick off her campaign’s get- outthe-vote efforts with a rally in Union City, where she launched her political career four decades ago, on Thursday evening.
Still, in a state as massive as California, there are only so many voters even the most energetic candidate can shake the hands of in five days — so the political weapon of choice is TV ads. The pro-Villaraigosa group, funded by charter school advocates like Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, released a pair of new spots focusing on Newsom’s decision as San Francisco mayor to take a weekend vacation to Hawaii in the wake of a massive oil spill in the S.F. Bay in December 2007. The spots show a grinning Newsom, and argue that he’s “not gonna work as governor.”
At the time, Newsom’s mayoral administration said the Coast Guard had underestimated the scale of the spill before Newsom left, and that he was in close communication with local officials while hewas away.
“I don’t see how my staying would have changed things,” Newsom told reporters in 2007. “I was gone all of two days, and it turned out to be one of the worst weekends of my life.”
The ads also blast the lieutenant governor for a lack of attendance in his current job. Newsom did miss more than a third of the meetings of the boards of regents for the University of California and California State University systems, the Los Angeles Times re- ported last month. Other candidates also missed meetings while serving on the same boards, but membership on those boards represents one of the few concrete responsibilities of being lieutenant governor.
The ads are thefirst from the pro-Villaraigosa group to directly take on Newsom. They’ve previously stuck with positive spots about the former L.A. mayor and negative ads against Cox.
The Berkeley IGS poll, which surveyed 2,106 likely voters online between May 22 and 28, had a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.