The first major statewide poll conducted after Eric Swalwell dropped out of the California gubernatorial race shows a real shake up on the Democratic side.<\/p>\n
The non-partisan Emerson College Poll shows while many of the candidates remain clustered, one has risen from virtual obscurity to one of the front runners.<\/p>\n
Eric Swalwell was leading other democratic candidates when he left the race, and it appears with his departure, his support has been redistributed throughout the field.<\/p>\n
Republicans Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco top the Emerson College Poll, with Hilton gaining four points and Bianco gaining three since last month. Democrats Tom Steyer, Katie Porter both got a bump upwards and Xavier Becerra jumped up from 3% to 10%.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s possible that Xavier Becerra, because of his resume and that he seems to be a good person, was sort of a second choice of voters, including Swalwell voters, and that his leaving the race resulted in Becerra rising as this Emerson Poll shows he did,\u201d Santa Clara County Democratic Party Chair Bill James said.<\/p>\n
Political analyst Paul Mitchell of Political Data said the type of voter matters.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe votes that Eric Swalwell earned in this race were largely progressive Democrats, more white, older, kind of the \u2018MSNBC moms\u2019 and so we\u2019d expected, based on prior polling, that the candidates who most benefit would be Tom Steyer, Katie Porter.\u201d Political Data Vice President Paul Mitchell said. \u201cXavier Becerra the former HSS secretary, the former Attorney General, he also seemed to benefit from this.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Mitchell says the tight Emerson Poll indicates it\u2019s possible no one breaks away.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe other end of the spectrum would be for some of these lower tiered candidates to start to get more attention, Matt Mahan, again Xavier Becerra or any of these other candidates, so we could find ourselves in a situation where this \u2018mudiness\u2019 of the governor\u2018s race seems to get even \u2018muddier\u2019,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Regardless, James said that\u2019s better than what could have happened.<\/p>\n
\u201cI do think that a lot of us feel that in some sense we dodged a bullet by having this information come to light before the primary when we could\u2019ve been saddled with Swalwell as our candidate,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
It will be interesting to see how fluid the numbers might be as the Swalwell scandal fades from the headlines, especially since the remaining candidates are so clustered together and if trailing candidates become more prominent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The first major statewide poll conducted after Eric Swalwell dropped out of the California gubernatorial race shows a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":271960,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8],"class_list":{"0":"post-271959","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-california","8":"tag-california","9":"tag-california-headlines","10":"tag-california-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271959"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271959\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/271960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}