(Press-News.org)
Irvine, Calif., July 2, 2025 — President Donald Trump’s approval ratings among California residents are tanking while Gov. Gavin Newsom’s favorability has improved, according to the latest UCI-OC Poll, administered by the University of California, Irvine School of Social Ecology.
In late May and early June, Newsom’s approval ratings looked nearly as bad as those for Trump. Fifty-nine percent of Californians disapproved of the governor’s job performance, nearly a third of them strongly at the time. Californians disapprove of Trump by more than a 2:1 ratio.
The federal government’s clash with California over recent immigration raids seems to have improved Californians’ impression of Newsom. Fifty-six percent of Californians now rate Newsom as “somewhat favorable” or “strongly favorable.”
“There is no mistaking that Newsom’s battle with Trump has been good for his standing in the state, certainly among Democrats and also with Independents,” says Jon Gould, dean of the School of Social Ecology, who oversees the UCI-OC Poll. “Newsom has an upside, which may help him if he chooses to run for president.”
Former Vice President Kamala Harris has not entered the gubernatorial race, but if she were a candidate, voters would prefer her, according to the Poll. When presented with a binary choice between Harris and an unnamed Republican, 41 percent of survey respondents chose Harris, 29 percent chose the Republican, 16 percent were undecided, and 14 percent said they would not vote. Harris maintains an 11 percent net favorability rating among Californians, the highest of candidates tested. Many respondents had never heard of several candidates, including those who have run statewide before.
“The path to governor seems well-paved for Vice President Harris if she decides to run. Although she lacks majority support at the moment, people know her better than the other candidates and generally view her favorably,” Gould says.
The Poll also found that Californians believe the state is on the wrong track by a 2:1 margin. The rate is 4:1 among Republicans and nearly 3:1 for Independents, whereas Democrats are evenly split. Among racial and ethnic groups, African Americans are an exception in narrowly believing that the state is headed in the right direction. Across age groups, only those Californians over 80 believe the state is on the right track.
Asked about funding priorities for the state, 70 percent of Californians named housing. Indeed, 33 percent listed housing as the top priority, mentioned almost twice as often as the next highest priority — health care.
However, significant partisan differences exist.
“Republicans differ from other Californians in their lower prioritization of housing and higher ranking of regulation relief, just as Democrats diverge in their higher prioritization of health care and education and lower rank for law enforcement and public safety,” Gould notes. “Perhaps the only issue on which there is broad agreement across partisan identification is the modest ranking for road and bridge maintenance and construction.”
Overall, the study, which polled more than 4,600 California residents in three separate surveys, found a disenchanted electorate, one worried about the direction of the state and concerned about several key policy issues.
“We’re in a period of disappointment and distrust,” Gould says. “No one seems happy with anything. And, the chasm between Democrats and Republicans is real and shows no signs of faltering.”
In addition, he says, “there has been a lot of talk — at least nationally — of the dire straits in which Democrats find themselves. In California, by contrast, Democrats may find their strength and future: they haven’t lost some key voting groups yet, several voters’ funding priorities (even among Independents) favor them, and Newsom just showed the potential political benefits of standing up to Trump. The question is whether the Democrats will be able to capitalize on those opportunities.”
The full UCI-OC Poll report is available online. For more information about the UCI-OC Poll, visit the website.
END
The downstream consequences of religion, politics and war can have far-reaching effects on the environment and on the evolutionary processes affecting urban organisms, according to a new analysis from Washington University in St. Louis.
Typically viewed from a sociological perspective, the implications of religion, politics and war are rarely discussed in the field of evolutionary biology. That should change, according to an international team of biologists, including Elizabeth Carlen in Arts & Sciences at WashU, co-lead author ...
New research reveals a surprising geometric link between human and machine learning. A mathematical property called convexity may help explain how brains and algorithms form concepts and make sense of the world.
In recent years, with the public availability of AI tools, more people have become aware of how closely the inner workings of artificial intelligence can resemble those of a human brain.
There are several similarities in how machines and human brains work, for example, in how they represent the world in abstract form, generalise from limited data, ...
Catalysis – the acceleration of a chemical reaction by adding a particular substance – is extremely important in industry as well as in everyday life. Around 80 % of all chemical products are produced with the help of catalysis, and technologies like exhaust catalysts or fuel cells are also based on this principle. One particularly effective and versatile catalyst is platinum. However, because platinum is a very rare and expensive precious metal whose production causes a lot of CO2 emissions, it is important to use as little of it as possible while maximizing its efficiency.
Catalysts with single ...
Tokyo, Japan – Operators have pumped water to cool the nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (FDNPP) since the accident in 2011 and treated this cooling water with the Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS), which is a state-of-the-art purification system that removes radioactive materials, except tritium. As part of the water molecule, tritium radionuclide, with a half-life of 12.32 years, is very costly and difficult to remove. The ALPS-treated water was accumulating and stored at the FDNPP site and there is limited space to store this ...
Canada must address the growing crisis of communicable diseases that has occurred in tandem with a rise in misinformation that threatens our health systems, argue authors in an editorial in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) https://www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.250916.
“A crisis of communicable diseases is unfolding in North America, just as Canada’s health systems’ responses are being hampered by the dismantling of public health and research infrastructure in the United States,” writes family physician Dr. Shannon Charlebois, medical editor, CMAJ, with ...
CLEVELAND, Ohio (July 2, 2025)—There has been a lot of research focused on understanding women’s experiences with depression during the menopause transition and early menopause, but there are few studies on perimenopausal women’s experiences with emotional arousal, such as anger. A new study shows that women’s anger traits significantly decrease with age starting at midlife. Results of the study are published online today in Menopause, the journal of The Menopause Society.
Anger is defined as antagonism toward someone or something, often accompanied by a propensity to experience and express it indiscriminately. ...
Research from the University of Adelaide’s School of Biological Sciences and Wildlife Crime Research Hub has highlighted evidence of shark products entering both Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, including clear patterns in flows between the two countries.
According to the study, published in Pacific Conservation Biology, the products identified were carried in personal luggage and postage, likely transported for personal use, as trophies, or for resale or consumption.
Most products seized upon entry to Australia came from Asia, ...
Imagine you are on a treasure hunt in a vast library with no catalog—typing random words into a search bar and hoping to stumble upon the exact book you need. That has been the reality for many roboticists trying to find the right ROS (Robot Operating System) package. With over 7,500 options available, keyword searches often return irrelevant results, wasting developers’ precious time and energy.
Researchers from the National University of Defense Technology and Zhejiang University have developed a more efficient method for searching. Instead of relying on simple word matching, their new tool uses a “knowledge ...
Imagine reading a long article or a thick legal contract and knowing, with confidence, exactly which lines prove that an event happened—or did not happen. That is now possible thanks to a research team at Soochow University. They have built a new neural network that not only determines if an event described in a document is real but also highlights the exact sentences that led it to that conclusion. In head-to-head comparisons with earlier approaches, this new model improved overall fact-checking accuracy by 2.5 points and exact-match ...
Aromatics, as extremely crucial basic chemicals in the modern industrial system, are widely used in many fields such as energy, medicine, materials and the daily chemical industry. However, the traditional petroleum-based production routes, such as naphtha cracking and catalytic reforming, are facing the dual pressures of tight petroleum resources and carbon emissions. Meanwhile, CO2, as a typical greenhouse gas, its efficient and value-added utilization offers dual benefits in both environment and economic development, but is limited by its thermodynamic stability, and there are still challenges in producing aromatics with high selectivity through hydrogenation pathways. Propane, as a major ...
