Feinstein sees slipping support among California voters: poll

Support for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) is slipping among California voters, according to a new poll released Wednesday night.

The longtime senators approval rating dropped to 49 percent, a survey conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California found, down seven points from a similar poll in January. About a third of California voters – 32 percent – gave Feinstein’s performance a thumbs-down.

Among Feinstein’s strongest supporters are California voters age 55 and older, as well as college graduates, 57 percent of whom approve of the job she’s doing.

{mosads}The 83-year-old Democrat has served in the Senate since 1992, and is up for reelection next year, though she has not yet said whether or not she’ll seek another term in Washington.

The state’s newest senator, former California Attorney General Kamala Harris (D), is seeing slightly lower levels of approval – 46 percent – according to the PPIC poll, while only 23 percent disapprove of her performance. 

Still, nearly a third of the state’s voters aren’t quite sure how to rate Harris, with 30 percent saying they don’t have an opinion on her performance. 

The relatively large proportion of voters in California that are unsure about their newest senator stands at odds with Harris’s reputation in Washington, where she’s considered a rising figure in Democratic circles and a potential presidential candidate for 2020.

President Trump remains widely unpopular in the liberal-leaning state, where only about 31 percent approve of his job performance during his first two months in office. The real estate mogul saw a similar level of support in January, where his approval rating came in at 30 percent. Both poll numbers are in line with how the state voted in the November election, in which he won roughly a third of the vote in California.

The poll was conducted by telephone between March 5 and March 14, and surveyed 1,706 California adults.