Poll Finds Few Know GOP Gubernatorial Candidate Kashkari
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Democratic incumbent Gov. Jerry Brown has a strong lead over his Republican challenger, Neel Kashkari, in a new statewide poll released Friday, which found that 1 in 4 likely voters could not even identify Kashkari.
The USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Poll found that Brown leads Kashkari 57 percent to 36 percent among likely voters.
Brown also enjoys a 58 percent approval rating, his highest in the poll since he took office in 2011 and up 10 points from 2012, when just 48 percent toll pollsters they approved of how the governor was handling his job.
Brown, 76, is well known to many Californians after spending a lifetime in politics. He has amassed nearly $23 million for his re-election bid from a wide array of donors, but spent very little so far.
Kashkari, 41, is a first-time candidate and former U.S. Treasury official who helped lead the federal bank bailout. After spending $4.4 million in the primary to defeat third-place finisher Tim Donnelly, Kashkari reported $200,000 in his account at the end of June and has collected just $650,000 since then.
Such amounts are not enough to mount a statewide television ad campaign in costly California, so Kashkari has used other tactics to generate attention.
This summer, he posed as a homeless man in Fresno to highlight what he says is the uneven economic recovery, and earlier this week he delivered 6,500 paper bags to Brown's office to protest legislation that would ban single-use plastic bags statewide, saying that the governor and Legislature are focusing on the wrong priorities.
Friday's poll also shows strong support among likely voters for Proposition 1, a $7.5 billion proposal to invest in California's aging water system.
The poll randomly surveyed 1,109 likely voters by telephone statewide from Sept. 2-8. It has a sampling error margin of plus or minus 3.3 percentage points.
Copyright 2014 The Associated Press.
