Peter Schrag
Nobody can say that the latest California poll by PPIC, the Public Policy Institute of California, released Wednesday night, includes many surprises. Like other recent polls, it shows tight races for both governor and U.S. senator and dismal approval ratings for the incumbent governor and Legislature.
But it also shows that on immigration, both GOP gubernatorial candidates, Meg Whitman and Steve Poizner, are on the wrong side of California voters – and by a lot. It shows that all three of the GOP Senate candidates are on the wrong side of the voters on health care.
Poizner, who says he supported Proposition 187, a 1994 initiative that sought to deny public services including schooling to all illegal immigrants, seems to want to drive them all out. Whitman, though somewhat more moderate, opposes all amnesty, “no exceptions,” and would deny illegal immigrants the right to attend public colleges and universities.
But in the PPIC poll, 70 percent say illegal immigrants should have a chance to keep their jobs and “eventually apply for legal status.” Only 25 percent say they should be deported. Even California Republicans seem to narrowly favor some form of legalization. (Among independents, the margin is 68-26 percent).
In the race for the GOP Senate nomination, two of the candidates, Carly Fiorina and Chuck DeVore, true to their fellow congressional Republicans, vow to repeal President Barack Obama’s health care law.
The third GOP candidate in the Senate race, Tom Campbell, a former law professor, while not taking the pledge to repeal the bill, opposes it and confidently predicts that the Supreme Court will find it unconstitutional. (Needless to say, a lot of constitutional lawyers disagree.) The Supreme Court, Campbell said, “has never upheld a mandate” requiring all Americans to have health insurance.
But the poll, taken before Sunday’s vote on the bill, shows Californians favoring the federal health bill 50 percent to 39 percent. In addition, a national poll taken by the Gallup organization after Sunday’s vote in the House shows support for the law picking up 12 percentage points, from 3 percent down two weeks before to a positive margin of 49-40 this week. So support in California now may well be higher than that 50-39.
By a large margin (69-27), Californians also told the PPIC pollsters that they support “requiring that all Americans have health insurance, with the government providing financial help for those who can’t afford it.”
All recent California polls show a close race between Democrat Jerry Brown and Whitman in the run for governor and an even closer one between either Campbell or Fiorina and Barbara Boxer for Boxer’s Senate seat. But the PPIC data on immigration and health care also suggest that on those issues – as on a list of other matters, from party affiliation to Afghanistan and the Middle East to the federal jobs and stimulus programs, to public employee unions and public programs – the races might not be so close after all.
Apart from this election, the PPIC numbers also indicate that on most social issues – immigration, gay rights – California has steadily moved in a liberal direction. For the first time in PPIC’s polls, half of Californians support the right of gay and lesbian couples to marry. Independents and Democrats both support it by wide margins and only Republicans oppose it, as they always have.
The poll numbers raise questions about the Poizner and Whitman strategies. Republicans narrowly support some eventual amnesty for illegal immigrants. Consider, also, that Gov. Pete Wilson’s strong support of Proposition 187 and the Wilson 1994 re-election campaign’s anti-immigrant message drove many Latinos into the Democratic camp.
Maybe the most enigmatic of all the candidates in these two races, however, is Brown, California’s attorney general and candidate (again) for governor. On Tuesday he issued what may be the strangest press announcement ever put out by an office like his.
“Thirteen attorneys general, all but one are Republican,” Brown said, “are rushing to kill the federal health care bill by filing lawsuits alleging that the bill violates states’ rights. Here in California, a handful of Republican leaders have followed suit and are asking that I join in.
“Accordingly, I’ve instructed deputies in my office to carefully review these claims in light of applicable constitutional principles. Health care is not the place, with people’s lives at stake, to engage in poisonous partisanship. At this critical time in our nation’s history, we need to come together to forge a common purpose.”
So why, given the moral stricture, didn’t he just ignore it, or tell the 13 other attorneys general to go stuff it or at least wait for word from his deputies?
Californians did a lot at the ballot box to create the mess we’re in. What did we ever do to deserve these people?