According to a recent California statewide survey, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is the clear front-runner in the Democratic primary election for Lieutenant Governor. Newsom holds a 21-point lead over Los Angeles City Councilwoman Janice Hahn in the initial vote, is much better known and has much higher favorability ratings, and performs strongly with Democratic primary voters across the state. With only one in four voters currently undecided, Newsom is extremely well positioned to win the Democratic primary for Lieutenant Governor in June.
The raw numbers are Newsom 47, Hahn 26, Undecided 27. Significantly, the crosstabs show Newsom has a statewide lead, including a tie in Southern California and a huge lead in San Diego. Hahn has a 43-32 lead in Los Angeles County, which is to be expected given her and her family’s deep roots there, but it’s clearly not enough of a lead to overcome Newsom’s strong showing across the rest of California, including a nearly 50 point lead for Newsom in the Bay Area.
Much of this appears to be Newsom’s higher name ID. And that in turn should cause people – especially Janice Hahn – to question Garry South’s negative campaign strategy. By attacking Newsom, Hahn is actually keeping his name ID high while doing little to nothing to improve her own name ID. That is helping preserve Newsom’s lead across the state.
Looks like Garry South’s record of failure will continue to be unblemished by success. Which is unfortunate, because Janice Hahn is a great person who could have made a compelling candidate. Instead she took Garry South’s flawed advice, went negative, and missed her chance to define herself in the eyes of the Democratic electorate.
There’s still a month left, time enough for her to drop Garry South and start running a real campaign that emphasizes her positives and why she should be Lieutenant Governor. Unless that happens, Newsom is almost certainly going to win the nomination.
Garry get’s nasty mean when he’s behind (which is usually the case). Oh, and Councilwoman Hahn, you’d better hope you never run against one of Garry’s clients, otherwise you might be reading in the newspapers about conversations with him that you thought were private. Guess that deal with the Devil didn’t work out so well for you, eh?
Spoken like a true college professor who overlooks the one obvious point in the poll which is that Newsome is destroying Hahn in the bay area where she hasn’t campaigned yet and where he has huge unfavorable ratings. Do you really think Democrats are going to put on their statewide ticket a guy who slept with his best friends wife? That hurts everyone, no pun intended.