Kamala Harris can't crack double digits among California voters asked who should lead the Democratic ticket in 2028. A UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll released Friday found just 9% of the state's registered voters named the former vice president as their first choice for the party's next presidential nominee, as the New York Post reported. She trailed Gov. Gavin Newsom, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
In her own state. Among her own party's voters. After decades of building a political career in California. Nine percent.
The poll, conducted online in English and Spanish among 5,019 California registered voters from March 9 to 14, carried a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points. That means Harris's support was so thin it barely cleared the survey's noise floor. Newsom led at 28%, more than tripling her share. When second-choice votes were factored in, Newsom climbed to 42% and Harris reached only 20%.
Newsom's first-place finish comes with an asterisk. Mark DiCamillo, director of the Berkeley IGS Poll, told the Los Angeles Times that Newsom receiving support from only roughly a quarter of California voters is worrying. The governor's job-approval rating has slipped from 51% in August to 48%, while his disapproval climbed by five percentage points.
So the Democrat who beat Harris by 19 points in their shared home state is himself losing ground. That's the state of the party's bench.
IGS co-director G. Cristina Mora tried to put a positive spin on Newsom's showing, crediting his combative posture toward the White House:
"The results seem to suggest that Newsom's more aggressive stance vis-à-vis President Trump, particularly through social media, appears to be resonating with Democratic voters in his home state."
Mora added that Californians "do see him as the strongest counter to Trump and MAGA candidates," even as they hold "mixed views on his gubernatorial tenure overall." Newsom will step down as governor after the 2026 election, freeing him to pursue a national campaign. Whether a governor whose own state gives him a 48% approval rating can sell himself to the rest of the country is another question entirely.
Perhaps the most striking number in the poll: Newsom dominated Harris among African American voters, 49% to 37%. Harris, who made history as the first Black woman to serve as vice president, lost the demographic by twelve points to a white governor in her home state. That gap speaks to something deeper than name recognition or campaign mechanics.
Harris once served two terms as California's attorney general and four years as a U.S. senator. She built her career in the state. She lost it there, too, at least by this measure.
Newsom drew his strongest support from older, Latino, and male voters. Harris's weakness cut across multiple groups. Mora attributed part of the problem to Harris's decisive 2024 loss to President Trump, combined with what Mora called "persistent voter biases against women and candidates of color."
"Harris' earlier presidential defeat, compounded by what appear to be persistent voter biases against women and candidates of color, may also be shaping these early numbers."
That framing is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Blaming voter bias for a 9% showing in the bluest state in the country requires ignoring a simpler explanation: voters watched Harris run a national campaign and decided she wasn't the answer.
Harris has spent the months since her 2024 loss on a "107 Days" book tour. She appeared at the Henry J. Kaiser Center For The Performing Arts in Oakland on March 3, talking about the book. She has blamed her lack of time to campaign for losing to Trump.
The book tour, the blame-shifting, the attempts to stay relevant, none of it appears to be working. Her effort to relaunch Kamala HQ as a youth mobilization outfit ahead of the 2026 midterms has not translated into grassroots enthusiasm, at least not in the state she knows best. A botched social media relaunch that handed million-follower accounts to an outside nonprofit only reinforced the impression of a political operation that can't find its footing.
And the damage isn't limited to organizational stumbles. Harris's public statements have repeatedly put her at odds with the voters she'd need to win back. She called Minneapolis protesters who blocked ICE operations "fantastic" and "beautiful", the kind of remark that plays well on progressive social media and badly everywhere else. Revelations that her own team questioned Josh Shapiro's ties to Israel during the VP vetting process raised separate questions about her political judgment and the people around her.
The Berkeley poll surveyed registered voters statewide, not just Democrats. But the question asked about the Democratic presidential nominee, and Mora's commentary explicitly referenced "Democratic voters in his home state." Either way, the sample was large, 5,019 respondents, and the institution conducting it, UC Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies, is a well-known academic polling outfit. These are not throwaway numbers.
The exact percentages for Ocasio-Cortez and Buttigieg were not specified in the reporting, but both finished ahead of Harris. That means a congresswoman from the Bronx and a former Cabinet secretary from Indiana outpolled the woman who carried California in 2024, in California.
Newsom's path looks stronger on paper, but his own softening approval should worry Democratic strategists. A governor who can't hold 50% in his own state while riding a wave of anti-Trump media coverage faces an uphill climb in a general election. His 28% first-choice number means nearly three-quarters of California voters preferred someone else.
The Democratic Party's 2028 field is shaping up to be a contest among candidates who are all, to varying degrees, damaged goods. Newsom leads a pack of the underwhelming. Harris barely registers. The party that spent 2024 insisting it had the strongest possible candidate now can't find one its own base wants.
Watch for the spin. Mora's preemptive framing, that voter bias explains Harris's poor numbers, will likely become the default progressive explanation. It's the same playbook Democrats ran after the 2024 election. The loss wasn't about policy, messaging, or the candidate. It was about bigotry.
But California's electorate is among the most progressive in the nation. If voter bias against women and candidates of color drives outcomes there, the Democratic Party has a problem no nominee can fix. The more plausible reading is simpler: voters evaluated Harris, found her wanting, and moved on.
Nine percent is not a starting point. It's a verdict. And no book tour will appeal it.
