California Statewide Election Poll 2024
results are in
Here are the results of our 2024 CA Statewide Election Poll
With Most Votes Cast, Harris Underperforms in Home State
The election in California is over for 52% of the electorate, and, while the Harris/Walz ticket will claim the state’s 54 electoral votes, it’s significantly underperforming the 2020 Biden/Harris ticket. The President reeled in 63.5% of the vote then; Harris stands at just 53% now. Adjusting for currently undecided registrants, CERC projects she’ll wind up in the upper 50s. Trump/Vance, on the other hand, will likely exceed the 34.3% tallied by the 2020 Trump/Pence campaign. All this is a good sign for Trump nationally and an ominous sign for Harris, though battleground state campaigns could alter the narrative.
The outlook in the US Senate race has US Representative Adam Schiff comfortably ahead of former baseball star Steve Garvey, but it’s not the blowout most observers anticipated. Schiff takes 52%, while Garvey gets 42%, notably out-polling Trump.
President
Harris’ underperformance stems from two main problems. First, California voters are upset. While 38% feel the state is headed in the right direction, half describe it as “on the wrong track” and 40% strongly feel that way. Being the incumbent – sort of – in this match-up with former President Trump – Harris is losing that large group of very negative voters by a vast margin. Compounding the problem, valuable nonpartisan
voters – who often decide elections – are particularly unhappy, with 62% in the “wrong track” camp and just 27% pleased with how things are going. The vice-president wins the rest of the less-surly electorate by varying margins, but there aren’t enough of them to get her to where Democrats expect to be in this reliably blue state.
Also, while Harris will win nearly all liberal Democrats, her margin among centrist Democrats and liberal members of third parties is not robust. Eighteen percent of them say they’ll pick someone other than Trump or Harris. Conservative Democrats are defecting, siding with Trump more often than her. The former president also has a lock on the relatively small group of conservative Republicans, but he also generally enjoys the support of other conservatives, as well as moderates who aren’t Democrats.
Other significant differences revealed by the poll include Trump winning voters without a college degree, competitive with Harris among those who have earned an associate’s degree and Harris handily winning those with a bachelor’s or graduate degree. Harris’s struggles with male voters have been documented, and this poll indicates the same in California. However, it’s really middle-aged men who are her nemesis: Trump wins them 59% to 33%.
There is no difference in the margins of the two candidates between those who have already voted and those who haven’t yet. However, while only 1.5% of those who have voted punched another name, 7.5% who have not yet voted are looking at a third- party candidate. It is among those voters, along with the 8.5% who are still undecided, that Harris hopes to get closer to typical Democratic margins in her home state.
US Senate
The race for US Senate is more of an ideological contest, despite Garvey’s lack of political profile or experience. That’s because Schiff gained the admiration of liberals by directly taking on Trump. They are now repaying his Capitol Hill crusade in the currency of stalwart support. In California, where 53% of the voters are on the left, Garvey can win the moderates and conservatives, but still lose to Schiff because he’s such a darling of the left.
True, the dark mood plays against Schiff. Like Harris, he loses the strongly negative crowd by a giant margin. But, unlike Harris, Schiff is not chasing Biden’s benchmark and all its implications as Harris is. For Schiff, 50% plus-1 is enough to claim California’s US Senate seat.
Methodology
Competitive Edge Research (CERC), established in 1987, is California’s premier political research firm. This scientific poll was conducted October 28-30, 2024, among a random sample of 517 voters pulled from California registration rolls. CERC’s live interviewers invited respondents to take the survey via landline and cell phone. Invitations were also sent via text and via email. The margin of sampling error is +/- 4.3 at the 95% confidence level. Sampling error may not be the only source of polling error.
Partisan divisions are 48%-28%-17%-7%, Democrats-Republicans-independents-minor party. Respondents were screened for their intention to vote and those reporting they were unlikely to cast a ballot were removed from the sample. The topline and crosstabs can be accessed below.