Latest California Primary Polls 2016: Democratic Results Split For Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton

With the largest trove of delegates of the Democratic race, the 2016 California primary polls are being watched with more scrutiny than ever before. Usually, the state’s massive cache is held off until nearly dead last to give smaller states more of a voice, but this time around, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are still unrelentingly pursuing the party’s presidential nomination.

Of course, with the California primary’s impressive offering of 546 delegates, the election on June 7 will be tense — even if you think Bernie has already lost the nomination to Hillary. A sizable amount of them, 73 to be exact, are super delegates — the majority of whom have pledged support for Clinton.

Despite the Super Tuesday-like number of primaries next week, the California race gets a particularly intense focus. A firm win for Sanders is the only way he could meaningfully regain traction. In his favor, some polls do indicate that Hillary’s formerly commanding lead has shrunk significantly.

UPDATE: The latest poll from Wall Street Journal, Marist and NBC gives Clinton a two-point lead on Bernie in the California primary — 49 percent Hillary, 47 percent Sanders. It featured just over 500 likely Democratic voters.

The Public Policy Institute of California polled 552 likely voters last week — predicting the primary going 46 percent Clinton, 44 percent Sanders. The poll’s margin of error, 5.7 percent, could either swing in Bernie or Hillary’s favor, but some political analysts like Nate Silver have not given this poll much weight, citing a “house effect” — when results show an outcome that contrasts sharply with other data.

In the other most recent California poll, Clinton still finds herself comfortably ahead of Sanders. SurveyUSA and KABC also completed a survey last Sunday, but it yielded much different results than the PPI poll: Hillary leads by 18 percentage points with 57 percent of the vote compared to Bernie’s 39 percent. Further in that poll’s favor, it had a larger sample size of 803 likely voters. It’s also in line with the largest poll — CBS and YouGov with more than 1,000 voters — where Clinton held a similar 16 percentage point advantage in April.

Still, Sanders supporters can find comfort in the fact that the California polls will be open to independents — a quality that has been beneficial to Bernie in the past, particularly in primaries like Michigan where early numbers showed Hillary trouncing him by a significant margin.

In Clinton’s favor, the California demographic information does feature a large populations of one of her biggest strongholds: Latinos. In fact, nearly 40 percent of Californians identify as Hispanic or Latino, according to the latest U.S. census data.

While the California Republican primary may be receiving a collective “Who cares?” due to the inevitability of Donald Trump’s nomination, polls do point to strong support for the candidate in the state anyway. While no major polls for the GOP race have been released this month, at the end of April, Donald was taking a 50-percent share of the vote, followed distantly by Ted Cruz with 20 percent. In another poll from CBS and YouGov with a massive 1,000-person sample size, that lead was slightly smaller — with Trump taking 49 percent of the vote, but Cruz only behind 18 percentage points with 31 percent.

Super delegates aside, 475 delegates are up for grabs in the 2016 California Democratic primary polls, not to mention the five other latest primaries on the same day: New Jersey, New Mexico, Montana, South Dakota, and North Dakota. In total, Democratic candidates will be competing for more than 800 delegates — including superdelegates who may be influenced by their state’s voting.

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