Guest
Mark Baldassare, Statewide Survey Director, Public Policy Institute of California
Guest Bio
Mark Baldassare is one of California’s leading experts on public opinion and how its voters behave. He has directed the PPIC Statewide Survey since 1998 and led the Public Policy Institute of California as president and CEO from 2007 to 2022. Before PPIC he taught urban and regional planning at UC Irvine, and unlike most pollsters he trained in sociology, earning his PhD at UC Berkeley. He has written ten books, including A California State of Mind: The Conflicted Voter in a Changing World.
Show Summary
“Both parties are underwater in terms of their favorability,” says Mark Baldassare. In this episode of State of Gold, host Jon Slavet sits down with the longtime California pollster to ask why voters who say the state is headed in the wrong direction keep voting the same way.
Baldassare says it comes down to how people feel about both parties. Asking a Democrat to vote for a Republican, or the other way around, is a hard choice, because voters “have questions about what the alternatives might do.” His polls keep finding Californians who say a third party is needed, which he reads as deep disappointment in both major parties. The biggest change since he wrote about the conflicted voter, he says, is that distrust of government has become “a fact of life,” along with a hyper-partisanship that keeps people in their political lane. He points to Arnold Schwarzenegger, an independent thinker who did his homework, and to Jerry Brown’s canoe theory of politics, paddling to the left and to the right, as what wins voters over.
The conversation moves to the ballot. Voters want to keep the initiative process, he says, but think special interests have too much influence, and they would rather have debates, town halls and a Citizens Initiative Commission than commercials. Only one in three initiatives passes, because “the default for voters is to say no.” He closes on Prop 45, the environmental review measure that pits more housing against the reasons to vote no, as the vote he expects to be the biggest surprise.
Chapters
00:00 – Cold Open: “I Don’t Actually Like Either of Them That Much”
00:19 – Welcome: Statewide Survey Director Mark Baldassare on Conflicted Voters
01:20 – Both Parties Underwater: Why Unhappy Voters Won’t Switch
02:41 – Fear of the Unknown: Why Californians Want a Third Party
03:21 – The Conflicted Voter, 24 Years On: Distrust Becomes a Fact of Life
04:33 – Grumpy Voters: Who Californians Blame Depends on Their Party
05:58 – Breaking Party Lines: Schwarzenegger and Jerry Brown’s Canoe Theory
09:31 – Shifting Opinion: Same-Sex Marriage, Prop 187 and a GOP That Didn’t Move
10:50 – Ballot Overload: 14 Propositions and How Voters Would Fix the System
12:47 – Prop 39 Voter ID: Who Should Write the Ballot Language?
15:22 – Prop 40 Billionaire Tax: When in Doubt, Voters Vote No
17:28 – Election Night Surprise: Why Prop 45 Is the One to Watch
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