By more than 2 to 1, voters both nationally and in California say they are more worried than hopeful about changes in the country’s morals and values. By nearly the same margin, more worry than express hope about the changing national economy. And by 5 to 1, they say they are worried about how the nation’s politics have changed.
California voters and those nationwide largely agree on those points but diverge on others. Nationally, for example, voters divide almost evenly on whether cultural diversity worries them or makes them hopeful. In California, those who are “mainly hopeful” about the changes caused by cultural diversity outnumber those “mainly worried” 56% to 41%.
Those concerns — detailed in a new USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll, conducted online by SurveyMonkey — have been driving voter decisions about which candidates they favor for president. Both in California and nationwide, they have helped propel two nontraditional candidates, businessman Donald Trump and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, to the forefront of the Republican field.
Voters’ downbeat mood is particularly notable in light of economic numbers typically associated with good times. The nation’s unemployment rate, 5%, is the lowest since April 2008, and the economy has grown steadily, albeit slowly, since the recession officially ended in June 2009.
Still, by 70% to 29%, voters see the country as headed in the wrong direction. California voters are only marginally more positive, with 63% saying the country is headed the wrong way and 34% seeing the nation as being on the right path.
That sense of the country headed the wrong way has been true now for a dozen years, through two presidencies, for “the longest period of sustained pessimism in more than a generation,” said Neil Newhouse, a veteran Republican pollster who advised Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012.
Pessimism is particularly profound among white voters, especially those without a college education. In California, fewer than 1 in 4 non-college-educated whites say the country is on the right track, and 70% say they are worried about the way the economy has changed. Nationally, the worried share among the group is even higher, 74%.
By contrast, racial and ethnic minority voters have a considerably more upbeat view, particularly those who have graduated from college.
Those two groups — whites who have not graduated from college and minorities who have — stand at opposite ends of the political spectrum. Non-college-educated whites have become a bulwark for Republicans, while upwardly mobile minority voters have reshaped the Democratic Party.
In California, where about half of college-educated minority voters are optimistic about the economy, the two groups are of similar size, each about one-fifth of the electorate. Nationally, whites without college degrees outnumber college-educated minorities by about 3 to 1.
Nationally, voters divide closely over whether “immigrants from other countries mainly strengthen American society” or “mainly weaken” it, with 49% seeing immigrants as a source of strength and 43% as a weakness.
In California, with its much larger population of minorities, 59% see immigrants strengthening America and 35% say they “mainly weaken American society.”
On the Democratic side, fewer voters express concern about economic change than do Republican voters. Instead, Democrats’ unease centers more on the sense that the economy has tilted too much in favor of the rich.
Asked which is a bigger problem, “unfairness in the economic system that favors the wealthy” or “over-regulation of the free market that interferes with growth,” voters split sharply by party.
Among self-identified Democrats, more than 8 in 10, both statewide and nationally, name unfairness as the bigger problem. Republicans mostly say the opposite, with just under three-quarters naming over-regulation.
By roughly 60% to 40%, voters overall side with the Democrats on that issue. But that does not translate into belief in government’s ability to solve the problems voters see in their lives.
Only 1 in 10 voters nationwide, and 1 in 8 in California, say that the federal government “increases opportunities for people like me.” Half of voters nationally and 4 out of 10 in California say the government “gets in the way.”
http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/la-na-presidential-poll-20151108-story.html