Legislators are generally convinced that if people only paid more attention to the work elected officials do in Sacramento, there would be a lot more sympathy for the plight of the poor politician.
But a poll released Thursday by the Public Policy Institute of California seems to show that the more involved people are in government, the less they like the people making the laws.
Take, for example, the job approval ratings for the state Legislature. When the poll asked a sample of all California adults how the Assembly and state Senate were doing, 18 percent thought they were doing a good job.
Limit that sample to people registered to vote in the state and the approval rate slips to 15 percent. But when only those people who are registered and likely to vote are surveyed, the Legislature’s approval skids to a rock-bottom figure of 10 percent. That’s a record, by the way, but don’t expect to see any celebrations in the Capitol.
Eighty percent of those same likely voters – the folks most likely to watch what’s going on in Sacramento because they believe they have a stake in what happens – disapprove of the way legislators are handling their work. Only 10 percent have no opinion, which is the lowest number of any of those three groups of California residents.
A study done by PPIC chief Mark Baldassare in 2006 showed that the state’s most faithful voters are far from a mirror image of Californians as a whole. As a rule, those likely voters are older, richer, whiter and more conservative than the state’s overall population.
But, Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman and Damon Dunn aside, the folks who can be relied upon to cast their ballots at every election are also the ones most likely to be paying attention to politics and government, the people who believe they have a dog in the fight when it comes to Sacramento arguments about what’s best for the state and its residents.
In another instance of “the more you know, the less you like it,” the new poll found likely voters even more pessimistic about the state’s future than Californians as a whole. And when you look at the overall depth of despair, that’s a pretty good trick.
Only 17 percent of California adults believe the state is headed in the right direction, but that number plummets to 12 percent for the people who vote most regularly. When asked if they saw good economic times ahead, it was 23 percent when everyone was surveyed, but only 17 percent for the likely voters.
The stark unhappiness and dissatisfaction expressed by the people most likely to show up at the polls in next year’s elections should set off alarms for anyone who’s going to be on the ballot. But the atmosphere for incumbents could be even more toxic.
In that same 2006 study on the California electorate, Baldassare also found that likely voters “tend to be much more positive than nonvoters about their elective officials.”
The likely voters in the latest PPIC poll were feeling anything but warm and fuzzy toward their elected officials. So if these relatively conservative, incumbent-friendly voters are so desperately unhappy with the job their representatives are doing, they could also be looking to make somebody pay come June and November.
John Wildermuth is a longtime writer on California politics.