With less than a month left before the November 5 election, challenger Nathan Hochman leads the incumbent Los Angeles County district by 30 percentage points. Atty. Jorge Gascón in a new referendum.
If the election were held today, 51% of likely L.A. County voters would choose Hochman, and 21% would vote for Gascón, according to a UC Berkeley Institute of Government Studies poll, co-sponsored by The Times. This leaves 28% undecided.
Hochman has improved his position since August 18 Last Times-UC Berkeley Poll The race was won by a former federal prosecutor with 25%.
“It’s not even close,” said poll director Mark DiCamillo. To retain his seat, Gascón will have to make a significant change in voter perception in the coming weeks, he said.
“It now appears to be Hochman’s race to lose. He is way ahead,” DiCamillo said.
In an interview on Friday, Gascón said he “came from quite a bit from behind in 2020,” and he expects to do so again next month to win by a “tight margin.”
“I feel very excited about the final outcome,” he said. “When people ask me about voting, I say that voting on Election Day is what really matters.”
While Gascón finished far behind incumbent Jackie Lacey in the 2020 primary, he received a large base of support and outside donations to win the general election in the summer. And never had he faced such a severe turnout.
Of those who supported Hochman, the former chair of the L.A. City Ethics Commission and assistant U.S. Attorney General, 66% said an “extremely important” factor was the need to “damp down the unrest and bring about necessary changes in the District Attorney’s Office.”
For Gascón, a former assistant chief of the LAPD and two-time district attorney of San Francisco, 55% of his supporters identified “his efforts to increase police accountability” as an “extremely important” factor.
Although 43% of all likely voters surveyed said their overall opinion of Hochman was either “strongly favorable” or “somewhat favorable”, only 23% said the same of the incumbent. Nearly half of those surveyed held an unfavorable view of Gascón, which is echoed in surveys conducted during Crowded primary earlier this year.
As Election Day rapidly approaches, many voters are confused about their options: 49% of those surveyed said they had “no opinion” on Hochman and 26% said the same about Gascón. Said.
Still, the proportion of undecided voters has fallen by 7% since the August vote. And since then the majority of voters choosing a candidate “are mostly going Hochman,” DiCamillo said.
The candidates are set to debate each other in a live broadcast co-hosted by The Times and KNX on Tuesday at 5 p.m., and ask questions about key issues in the race.
In a statement to The Times, Hochman said the polling figures “match what I’ve heard from L.A. County voters over the past year.”
He said, “People don’t feel as safe as they did before George Gascón took office and they want a DA who will prosecute crime, restore balance and improve public safety.”
The new survey — which has a 3-point margin of error and was administered online in English and Spanish between Sept. 25 and Oct. 1 — asked 908 likely county voters how they perceive “crime and threats to public safety in Los Angeles County.” “How do you feel about. , 94% of respondents said those concerns were “a big problem” or “somewhat of a problem”, while only 5% said they were “not a problem” and 1% were undecided.
That’s bad news for Gascón, DiCamillo said, because it reflects “voters’ perception” that crime is a big problem in L.A. County. “And they’re not giving Gascon credit for doing much about it,” he said.
According to California Department of Justice data, violent crime is expected to increase by nearly 8% in L.A. County from 2019 to 2023, and property crime is up by 14%. Police data shows some violent crime is down in downtown L.A. this year, Gascón pointed out during the campaign.
Gascón has repeatedly noted that jurisdictions with more traditional prosecutors, such as Orange and Sacramento counties, have seen larger violent crime increases over the same time frame.
But voters are not liking any of these things.
“Voters don’t know the data,” said Roy Behar, a political consultant to several Democrat campaigns across California. “What they know is anecdotal. And over the past four years there have been a large number of television anecdotes involving shop vandalism or other violent acts, giving rise to the perception that crime is running rampant.”
Gascón acknowledged that it is “frustrating” when people blame him “for things I don’t have control over,” such as police not making arrests in high-profile cases or the actions of city attorneys.
“How can it be my fault that a mansion in (Bel Air) was vandalized?” he asked in reference to an incident In the city of LA, which has its own prosecutor’s office that handles most minor crimes.
More than 60% of voters surveyed cited “violent crime resulting in serious injury or death,” “robbery or robbery on the street or in transit” and “robbery and robbery at retail stores” as areas of crime. Worried about.
Hochman has seized on viral videos of incidents such as robberies and the ransacking of the mayor’s mansion, adding to these often highly visible crimes an air of “anarchy” he insists Gascón created.
Hochman’s campaign may not always link specific events to policy decisions made by the incumbent, but that doesn’t matter when people go to the polls. Attitudes on crime appear to be changing more widely – as reflected Polls show overwhelming support for Proposition 36, Which would impose tougher penalties for retail theft and crimes involving fentanyl.
Recent polling shows that 59% of L.A. County voters support the measure, which would essentially replace Proposition 47, a landmark criminal justice reform bill co-authored by Gascón.
In that political climate, Behar said, Gascón’s re-election bid is akin to “cliff climbing.”
“Even if there is no polling on the DA race, the Proposition 36 numbers in L.A. County will provide very solid evidence of where this race is going,” said Dan Schnurr, a former adviser to Republican politicians who teaches political communication. At USC. “It’s almost impossible to imagine a candidate like Gascón winning in a county that passed (Proposition) 36 by such a large margin.”
Despite the fact that the poll results favored Hochman, DiCamillo cautioned people against canceling the contest at this stage.
“This is not over,” DiCamillo said. “There is still more to come.”
Schnurr, however, was all set to announce Hochman as LA’s next district attorney.
He said, “If the Gascons pull it out, our great-grandchildren will read about it in history books.”
