With less than a month until the November 5 election, challenger Nathan Hochman has a 30-point lead over the incumbent Los Angeles County president. Atty. George Gascón in a new poll.
If the election were held today, according to the UC Berkeley Institute for Government Studies survey co-sponsored by the Times, 51 percent of likely voters in Los Angeles County would choose Hochman and 21 percent would choose Hochman. would vote for Gascón. This leaves 28% undecided.
Hochman has improved his standing since Aug. 18, when the last Times-UC Berkeley poll on the race gave the former federal prosecutor a 25 percent victory.
“It’s not even close,” said Mark DiCamillo, poll director. In order to keep his seat, he said, Gascón will have to significantly change voters’ perceptions in the coming weeks.
“This now appears to be Hochman’s race to lose. He’s ahead,” DiCamillo said.
In an interview Friday, Gascón said he “came way back in 2020” and planned to do it again to win by “a tight margin” next month.
“I’m very optimistic about the end result,” he said. “When people ask me about the polls, I say it’s the Election Day poll that really matters.”
While Gascón fell far behind incumbent Jackie Lacey in a 2020 primary, he received a huge wave of outside support and donations in the summer before his general election victory. And at no time has he faced such a disastrous poll.
Among those supporting Hochman, former chairman of the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission and deputy U.S. attorney general, 66 percent said an “extremely important” factor was the need to “reduce unrest and to make the necessary changes to the prosecutor’s office.
For Gascón, a former LAPD deputy chief and two-term San Francisco district attorney, 55 percent 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 outgoing president. About half of those surveyed had an unfavorable opinion of Gascón, echoing polls during the crowded primary earlier this year.
With Election Day fast approaching, many voters remain hesitant about their options: 49% of respondents said they had “no opinion” about Hochman and 26% said the same thing on Gascón.
However, the proportion of undecided voters has fallen by 7% since the August election. And the majority of voters who have chosen a candidate since then “are mostly moving toward Hochman,” DiCamillo said.
The candidates are scheduled to debate Tuesday at 5 p.m. in a live broadcast co-hosted by the Times and KNX, and will answer questions on key issues in the race.
In a statement to the Times, Hochman said the poll numbers “match what I’ve heard from voters in Los Angeles County over the past year.”
“People don’t feel as safe as before George Gascón came to power and they want a prosecutor who will pursue criminals, restore balance and improve public safety,” he said.
The new poll — 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 what they thought about “crime and threats to public safety in Los Angeles County.” .” These concerns are “a big problem” or “somewhat of a problem,” according to 94% of respondents, while only 5% said they were “not a problem” and 1% were undecided.
That’s bad news for Gascón, DiCamillo said, because it reflects the “voters’ perception” that crime is a big problem in Los Angeles County. “And they don’t give much credit to Gascón for fixing it,” he said.
Violent crimes increased by about 8% between 2019 and 2023 in Los Angeles County, and property crimes increased by 14%, according to data from the California Department of Justice. Police data does show a downward trend in violent crime in the city of Los Angeles this year, as Gascón pointed out on the campaign trail.
Gascón repeatedly pointed out that jurisdictions with more traditional prosecutors, like Orange and Sacramento counties, saw larger spikes in violent crime during the same period.
But none of this resonates with voters.
“Voters don’t know the data,” said Roy Behr, a political consultant for several Democratic campaigns across California. “What they know are anecdotes. And over the last four years, there have been countless television stories of store burglaries and other violent acts that have given the impression of rampant crime.”
Gascón acknowledged that it is “frustrating” that people blame him for “things over which I have no control,” such as the police not making arrests in high-profile cases or the actions of prosecutors. municipal.
“How can it be my fault that a mansion in [Bel Air] was vandalized? he asked, referring to an incident in the city of Los Angeles, which has its own district attorney’s office responsible for handling most minor crimes.
More than 60 percent of voters surveyed cited “violent crimes that could result in serious injury or death,” “assaults or thefts on the street or in transit,” and “break-ins and break-ins at retail stores » among the areas of crime in which they concentrate. concerned about.
Hochman has seized on viral videos of thefts and incidents such as the break-in at the mayor’s residence, often linking highly visible crimes to the air of “anarchy” he insists Gascón has created.
Hochman’s campaign can’t always connect specific incidents to policy decisions made by the outgoing president, but that may not matter when people go to the polls. Attitudes toward crime appear to be changing more broadly, as evidenced by polls showing overwhelming support for Proposition 36, which would impose tougher penalties for retail theft and crimes involving fentanyl.
A recent poll shows that 59% of Los Angeles County voters support the measure, which would effectively replace Proposition 47, a landmark criminal justice reform bill co-authored by Gascón.
In this political climate, Behr said, Gascón’s re-election bid is tantamount to “climbing a cliff.”
“Even if no polling had been done on the DA race, the Prop. 36 numbers in Los Angeles County would provide very strong evidence of where this race is headed,” said Dan Schnur, a former advisor to Republican politicians who teaches political communication. at USC. “It is almost impossible to imagine a candidate like Gascón winning in a county that passes [Proposition] 36 with such a huge margin.
Despite the fact that the poll results appear overwhelmingly in Hochman’s favor, DiCamillo cautioned people against canceling the contest at this point.
“It’s not over,” DiCamillo said. “There’s more to come.”
Schnur, however, was almost ready to declare Hochman as the next Los Angeles district attorney.
“If Gascón succeeds in implementing this, our great-grandchildren will read about this in the history books,” he said.
