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 ,” 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 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