Big News in Today’s Field Poll: Boxer Positioned for Re-election

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Frank D. Russo

The California Field Poll released today shows that Barbara Boxer enjoys a net positive 17 point rating from California’s registered voters on their approval of her job performance. Field has the numbers at 48% approval and 31% disapproval with 21% having no opinion. Looking at the breakdown by party registration, Boxer does well with Democrats (70% to 12%) and does poorly with Republicans (20% to 62%). Most importantly, she does well with “non-partisan/others”—independent voters by 44% to 24%.

Boxer’s numbers are the big news from the Field Poll—as she is up for re-election in 2010—and even now there is much discussion about that race. Although much will be written about what the numbers say about Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein that were covered in today’s release, Pelosi runs in her San Francisco District and Feinstein is not up until 2012 and may or may not not run for re-election. We’ll return to Boxer after a brief look at these other numbers. What is surprising about Boxer’s numbers is that they are statistically the same (off by one percent) as those of Feinstein who is ever popular with California voters and coasts to re-election year after year. That is a good change for her, as she has usually trailed Feinstein’s high numbers by some degree.

Field also asked California voters of their opinions of Nancy Pelosi’s job performance as Speaker of the U.S. House and found them to be negative with 30% approval and 39% disapproval. A full 31% have no opinion. I’m not sure of the relevance of this question unless Pelosi is planning on running for statewide office. She is popular with voters in her San Francisco District. She just won her Democratic primary with 89% of the vote against a challenger. Statewide, there is a partisan split with Democrats approving (47% to 23%) than Republicans disapproving by a large margin (16% to 62%) and non-partisan/others disapproving (18% to 37%) with a very high 45% of these independent voters having no opinion one way or the others.