Poll has Harris easily winning state’s race for open Senate seat

Attorney General Kamala Harris is on a glide path into California’s first open Senate seat in a generation, lapping fellow Democrat Rep. Loretta Sanchez by 22 percentage points, according to a Field Poll released Wednesday.

Harris has not so much risen in the polls as Sanchez, a 20year veteran of Congress representing Orange County, has dropped, poll director Mark DiCamillo said.

“It’s clear that Sanchez hasn’t made any inroads,” DiCamillo said. “If anything, she has less support now than she did before the primary.”

Harris’ support has stayed fairly steady since last spring at 42 percent of likely voters, while Sanchez has slipped to 20 percent from 24 percent in July and 26 percent in late May.

The ease with which Harris is sailing toward victory — and the general somnolence of the Senate campaign — has surprised political experts, who expected a bigger fight for one of the top political prizes in California.

The Senate seat vacated by retiring Sen. Barbara Boxer, a Democrat, is the first to open in California since Boxer and fellow Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein won a pair of Senate victories in 1992.

The open Senate seat is “really one of the state’s three jewels,” along with the governorship and the other Senate seat held by Feinstein, said San Jose State University political scientist Larry Gerston. He blamed the lack of competition on the state’s top-two primary system that leaves voters in deep-blue California with a

choice of two Democrats.

For years, ambitious Democrats have been clamoring for a chance to move up a political ladder whose top rungs have been blocked by aging party leaders. When Boxer announced her retirement two years ago, she said she acted early to allow potential candidates time to prepare for what was expected to be an expensive and hardfought race.

But when Gavin Newsom, the former San Francisco mayor and now lieutenant governor who has his eye on the governorship, bowed out and former San Francisco district attorney Harris quickly stepped in, the field cleared, leaving the little-known Sanchez as Harris’ only real challenger.

Gerston said he is “astonished,” not by Harris’ 22-point lead, but by Sanchez’s poor campaign performance.

Sanchez had three big assets going into the race, Gerston said: her base in voter-rich Southern California, which has been locked out of the state’s top offices by Bay Area veterans Boxer, Feinstein and Gov. Jerry Brown; her Latino connection; and her center-right politics that gave her “the opportunity to get Republican votes, which could go nowhere else.”

Harris easily snatched the top spot in the June primary with 39.9 percent of the vote, while Sanchez came in second with 18.9 percent, in a field crowded with several Republicans, to earn her shot at Harris in November.

Sanchez has tried to woo Republicans by tacking right on issues such as terrorism and water policy.

“The problem,” DiCamillo said, “is that most Republicans are not backing her. They’re saying they’re not going to vote,” mainly because there is no Republican in the race.

Sanchez has potential to tap GOP voters “if she can get them to think more positively of her,” DiCamillo said. But her approval rating among Republicans is running at a negative 3-to-1, he said, so, “If that’s the strategy, she’s got a long way to go.”

Harris leads among nearly every other subgroup of likely voters, the poll found, whether categorized by age, gender, education or geographic region.

Even among Latinos, Sanchez is just holding even with Harris, the poll found, while Harris is leading Sanchez in Southern California. The poll found that more than a quarter of likely voters remain undecided.

Sanchez has lacked the money to run TV ads, the main way politicians court voters in sprawling California. Harris has not had to counter with her own, leaving the airwaves all but silent.

The Field/IGS Poll did not supply a margin of error. Opt-in polls such as the online survey do not lend themselves to the calculation of sampling error as easily as traditional telephone surveys, DiCamillo said. Carolyn Lochhead is The San Francisco Chronicle’s Washington correspondent. Email: clochhead@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @carolynlochhead