One year into the Obama presidency, voters in the nation’s biggest minority-majority

September 29, 2025 admin 0 Comments

One year into the Obama presidency, voters in the nation’s biggest minority-majority state are looking at their first minority president with increasing disappointment. According to a new six-language survey released by The Field Poll, popularity for the president is hovering around 56 percent in California.

That’s still higher than in many other parts of the country. But last March, two out of three California voters approved of the president’s job performance, said Mark DiCamillo, senior vice president of The Field Poll. “If you look at the last six U.S. presidents, Obama’s ratings put him in the lower end. Only Jimmy Carter had a lower job performance rating at his one-year anniversary.”

That’s not the only bad news for the president. Asian-American voters in California who were surveyed for the first time in Cantonese, Mandarin, Vietnamese and Korean, also have the highest percentage among all ethnic groups who said they had no opinion on the president’s job performance. For example, 29 percent of Vietnamese Americans declined to grade the president, compared to only 7 percent of African Americans. “We saw the no-opinion responses more for questions related to politics and government officials,” said DiCamillo. Some of those ‘no-opinions’ might actually be voters disillusioned with the president but reluctant to say that to a pollster, pushing the president’s numbers down even more. “That’s my guess, but it’s only a guess,” said DiCamillo.