New CA-36 Poll Shows Race Tied Between Bowen and Hahn, Winograd at 6%

An internal poll released by the Bowen campaign shows the candidate tied with Councilwoman Janice Hahn in the CA-36 primary. Marcy Winograd - who received 41% of the vote against Jane Harman in the 2010 primary race - is only polling at 6%, putting her in 4th place behind Republican Mike Gin.

In an initial match-up between all of the declared candidates, Bowen and Hahn are tied at 20 percent each, with the closest candidate, Mike Gin, at 8 percent. Marcy Winograd, another  Democrat in the race, receives only 6 percent support. Twenty-four percent of the electorate remains undecided. Bowen dominates in the Beach Cities and Venice with a double digit lead  over both Hahn and Winograd, and leads in all geographic regions except the Harbor area..

In a run-off matchup between Bowen and Hahn, Bowen (40 percent) pulls ahead of Hahn (36 percent) without any messaging. Sixteen (16) percent are currently undecided. While Hahn may have an advantage of name recognition in the district it is not translating into an advantage in votes, perhaps because her unfavorable rating is double that of Bowen.

Democrats continue to hold an advantage in this district. Voters in the district are more  likely to prefer a Democrat (41 percent), and 29 percent say they would prefer a Republican with another 27 percent say that the candidates party doesn’t really matter. Bowen shows her strength over Hahn among Decline-to-State voters, receiving 47 percent of the vote.

Bowen’s lead over Hahn grows even after voters are informed about key endorsers for  each candidate (including Feinstein, Lieu, Nakano, Firefighters and others for Hahn) and positive arguments being used by the respective campaigns.

With a July 12th runoff virtually assured, a couple of points jump out at me. At 24% in the primary, the number of undecideds in this race are a huge factor. Hahn has high name recognition, but she also has relatively high negatives - twice that of Bowen - and Hahn's endorsements don't seem to have had much effect on her polling.


The Feldman Group conducted the poll among 451 registered likely voters in California Congressional District 36 from April 4-7, 2011. The sample consisted of 401 registered likely voters and an oversample of 50 DTS voters. The margin of error for a sample of 401 is ± 4.9%.


UPDATE

Hahn's campaign manager pushed back with an impressive bit of verbal gymnastics,

"We're stunned that Bowen would release a poll that shows 80% of the voters she represented for 14 years rejecting her." said campaign manager, Dave Jacobson.

OK, forget the fact Jacobson apparently can't do math (24% of voters are undecided about anyone yet),  did he really mean to highlight that an equal number of Hahn's current constituents have rejected his boss?