63%

Near-supermajority of California voters want Sen. Dianne Feinstein to resign

Californians want Feinstein out, and her approval rating keeps tumbling lower and lower, according to a new poll from Emerson College.

Alex Shultz

A near-supermajority of California voters want Sen. Dianne Feinstein to resign from office, and her approval rating has fallen off a cliff, according to polling out Monday from Emerson College.

The poll, conducted from June 4 to June 7 among 1,056 California voters, shows that 63% of respondents believe Feinstein should step aside, compared to 37% who believe she should finish her term through 2024, when she’d be 91 years old. Her approval rating is at just 22%, compared to 48% disapproval and 31% no opinion. The poll has a 2.9% margin of error.

Feinstein was first elected to the Senate more than 30 years ago, in November 1992. She was most recently re-elected in 2018, garnering 54.2% of the vote. Her approval rating hovered around 50% for much of her tenure, according to other polling sources compiled by the Los Angeles Times, but began to fall precipitously around 2017.

In the years since, reports of Feinstein's faltering health have become more and more prevalent, while her staff seems to have increasingly shielded her from the press. Feinstein's "acute short-term memory issues" are an "open secret," according to The New York Times, and she was also absent from the Senate for more than two months this year, from late February until May 10, after a bout of shingles caused both Ramsay Hunt syndrome and encephalitis, the Times separately reported. After Feinstein returned to the Senate, she mistakenly told a Slate reporter that she had not been absent from the Capitol, nor had she been missing crucial votes.

“No, I’ve been here. I’ve been voting,” she said. “Please. You either know or don’t know.”

Emerson College has an A- pollster rating from FiveThirtyEight. It's the second pollster in recent months to deliver tough truths about Feinstein's lack of popularity. In late May, the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies found that 67% of respondents agreed with the statement, "Feinstein’s latest illness underlines the fact that she is no longer fit to continue serving in the U.S. Senate," and 42% respondents believed she needed to resign. (The reason for that discrepancy may have to do with the wording of the poll's questions.)

The UC Berkeley poll put Feinstein's approval rating at a dismal 29% — a full seven points higher than her approval rating in the newly released Emerson College poll.