Hillary Clinton’s image among voters in California has declined rapidly since July, as has her lead over Donald Trump in the Golden State, a new Field/Institute of Government Studies poll shows.
The Democratic presidential hopeful still edges Trump by double digits in the state, but the 24-point advantage she held earlier this summer has shrunk by 7 percentage points. Clinton now leads Trump 50 percent to 33 percent among California voters likely to participate in the November election.
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Clinton has spent significant time fundraising alongside Hollywood celebrities in the electorally rich state and was recently forced to cancel a two-day swing through California due to her pneumonia diagnosis.
Nevertheless, the former secretary of state’s frequent travel to the state appears to have done little to boost her image among voters. The same poll showed a 10-point increase since July in the percentage of Californians who hold a negative view of the former secretary of state, giving her a net-negative favorability rating for the first time in the state.
Additionally, 41 percent of respondents said they now have a “very unfavorable” opinion Clinton. Trump, meanwhile, has shown minor improvement in his favorability rating, though 56 percent of voters still view him very unfavorably.
“She’s totally lost whatever benefit she had from the convention,” Field Poll Director Mark DiCamillo said in a statement. “Much of the media’s focus over the past three weeks has been on Clinton, and you can see that she has not held up well in the national polls. And now you’re seeing the same thing in California.”
Another concern for Clinton in reliably blue California is the levels of support third-party candidates Jill Stein and Gary Johnson are attracting in comparison to 2012. Stein, the Green Party nominee, is at 6 percent support in the poll, compared to the 0.6 percent she pulled four years ago. Johnson, the nominee of the Libertarian Party, draws 5 percent support, nearly five times what he drew in 2012.
The Field/IGS poll of 1,426 likely voters in California was conducted Sept. 7-13, during which Clinton described half of Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables” and revealed that she had been diagnosed with pneumonia.
