Since he was elected president, Donald Trump has visited the most populous state in the nation once. He has a special antipathy to California, given that the state backed Hillary Clinton by more than 4.2 million votes, far more than the almost 2.9 million votes by which she won the popular vote. If only California had suddenly ceased to exist in the first week of November 2016, Trump would have won the electoral vote (by a lot) and the popular vote. But California is still there, gloating about its weather, and Trump is still the president who entered office despite the most significant popular-vote deficit in history.
But to hear him tell it on Twitter, California’s slowly coming around. The dark-blue state, he says, has its Democratic governor running scared, worried about immigration, the border and sanctuary cities.
Here’s the thing about this tweet, and I say this knowing that it may be a shock to your system: It’s not correct.
The Public Policy Institute of California polls the state’s residents regularly, including last month. It allows us to see, for example, that just over half of Californians actually approve of the job that Gov. Jerry Brown is doing. That is despite Brown being supported by only 1 in 5 Republicans.
(We’ve included some demographic breakdowns that we will get to a bit later.)
Brown doesn’t have stellar numbers, mind you, but in a partisan moment, they’re not terrible.
These are terrible numbers.
Only 3 in 10 Californians approve of the job Trump is doing, most of them Republicans. While a fifth of Republicans like Brown, only 8 percent of Democrats like Trump.
How unpopular is Trump in California? As rude as it is to say, he’s Congress unpopular.
But that’s somewhat beside the point. Brown is fairly popular and probably not terribly worried about pressure from Trump, much less the less-than-half the state that doesn’t like him. What’s more, the PPIC poll shows that on the other subjects Trump mentioned,…
