Californians are seriously unenthused about a hypothetical Kamala Harris gubernatorial bid, poll finds

Some Californians are largely unenthused about the prospect of former Vice President Kamala Harris launching a gubernatorial bid, according to a Politico and UC Berkeley Citrin Center poll released Tuesday.

The poll asked two groups, registered voters in California and “policy influencers,” to select from a list of possible emotions they felt about Harris hypothetically running for governor in the state: “joyful,” “mostly excited,” “indifferent,” “irritated,” “outraged,” “hopeless,” or other. Notably, 36% of the California “influencers” chose “indifferent” to describe how they would feel about Harris’ prospective bid for the state’s governor’s mansion.

Registered Democratic voters in California had a more positive view of Harris hypothetically running to lead the Golden State, with 33% saying they felt “joyful” about her possible candidacy and 41% feeling “mostly excited.” Meanwhile, the most popular responses among registered Republican voters surveyed were “irritated” and “outraged.”

While 35% of black registered voters surveyed said they felt “joyful” about the possibility of Harris running for governor and 38% selected “mostly excited,” other voters of color had mixed responses. Of Asian Americans surveyed, 18% said they were “irritated” at the prospect of Harris making a hypothetical bid, while 19% of Latino voters said the prospect made them feel “hopeless.”

“It’s almost a surprising lack of enthusiasm [from Latinos],” Jack Citrin, a political science professor at UC Berkeley, told Politico. “But we know from the general election that Latino voters shifted as compared to 2020 or 2016 towards [President Donald] Trump.”

The former vice president received a slim majority of support from Hispanic voters in the 2024 presidential election, at 53%, while Trump notched about 45% of the vote, a 13-point increase from 2020 and a record high for a Republican presidential nominee, according to NBC News exit polls.

Harris — who represented California in the Senate from 2017 to 2021 and served as attorney general of California from 2011 to 2017 — has not yet said if she is running in the 2026 California gubernatorial race. However, she is reportedly planning to make a final decision on whether to launch a gubernatorial bid by late summer. Harris has also been floated as a potential contender for the 2028 presidential race.

Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom is term limited and thus cannot run for reelection in 2026. Newsom is also seen as a likely candidate for the 2028 White House race.

Other candidates looking to replace Newsom as California’s governor include former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra and former Democratic California Rep. Katie Porter. Before serving in the Biden-Harris administration, Becerra served as California’s attorney general from January 2017 to March 2021 and previously represented a Congressional District in Los Angeles for 24 years.

During her failed 2024 presidential campaign against Trump, Harris notably lost all seven swing states. She carried her home state of California by just over 20 percentage points — significantly smaller than previous Democratic margins in the Golden State — notching 58.5% of the vote to Trump’s 38.3%. With Harris as his running mate, former President Joe Biden won California by 29 points in the 2020 presidential election.

The surveys were conducted on the TrueDot.ai platform from April 1 to 14 among 1,025 California registered voters and 718 influencers. Verasight provided the registered voter sample, which included randomly sampled voters from the California voter file, and the modeled error estimate for the voter survey is plus or minus five percentage points.

Harris’ office did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

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