Former Rep. Katie Porter, D-Calif., leads among possible candidates for governor of California in the latest poll from Politico-Citrin Center-Possibility Lab released on Thursday.
The survey, which was conducted after former Vice President Kamala Harris announced she would not seek to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom, who cannot run due to the state’s two-term limit, asked voters who they would vote for if the election were held tomorrow, listing almost a dozen likely candidates:
- Porter: 21%
- Republican Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco: 15%
- Republican former Fox News host Steve Hilton: 10%
- Democrat Former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra: 9%
- Democrat former Los Angles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa: 9%
- Democrat Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis: 7%
- Democrat former state Comptroller Betty Yee: 6%
- Democrat developer and businessman Rick Caruso: 6%
- Democrat former state Sen. Toni Atkins: 4%
- Democrat state Superintendent of Public Institutions Tony Thurmond: 2%
- Democrat businessman Stephen Cloobeck: 2%
- Other candidates: 9%
Jack Citrin, a political science professor at UC Berkeley who worked on the poll, said that Porter’s “gains from Harris are probably a combination of just being better known and having a clear ideological stamp. She has a particular progressive stamp — more than the other two guys — and I think that’s part of her appeal.”
The survey, which combined two opinion studies, polled 875 registered voters in California for the public opinion study from July 30-Aug. 11, 2025, with a margin of error of ±2.6 percentage points.
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