CA-07: Courtesy of Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones and the NRCC, we now have the first publicly available polling data in California's swingy 7th Congressional District. The survey, from Public Opinion Strategies, finds Jones, a Republican, trailing Democratic Rep. Ami Bera 46-45, while Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump 41-38. On its face, those numbers look like a tossup, but there's more worth examining.
Quite unexpectedly, POS included Bera's favorability rating, which stands at a rather positive 49-35. The pollster argues this is evidence the congressman is in a "much more polarized position" than Jones, who has favorables of 32-13. That means, of course, that most voters don't have an opinion of Jones yet, offering him proverbial "room to grow." But as he becomes better known, he'll find that the electorate in an evenly divided district such as this one is quite polarized indeed.
Bera, meanwhile, he has to be pretty happy to manage a +14 score in his opponent's polling, particularly considering the negative headlines he's endured lately. Those have come thanks to his father, Bob Bera, who’s been in the news for months after pleading guilty to a campaign finance scheme aimed at helping his son's congressional campaigns. (He was just sentenced to a year in prison shortly after this poll was in the field.) Ami Bera has not been linked to Bob Bera’s wrongdoing, but the story is one no candidate wants to deal with.
As for the presidential numbers, Barack Obama carried the 7th by a 51-47 margin in 2012, so Clinton's 3-point margin isn't wide of the previous mark. At the same time, though, it would be surprising to see Clinton perform less well than the man she's hoping to succeed: Trump has polled abysmally statewide in California, and there's no particular reason to think this well-off suburban Sacramento seat is Trump country.
What remains to be seen is whether Bera responds with polling of his own. If this, as an internal poll, represents the best the GOP can come up with, then Bera would be able to answer back with stronger numbers. If, on the other hand, Bera's polls show the same thing, then he may want to sit on them, because there would be no upside in simply confirming Jones' view of the race. After all, even Jones still has Bera up a point, so this isn't a case where your opponent shows you badly trailing. In such a situation, you'd feel compelled to answer lest donors and outside groups conclude you are in fact losing and conclude you’re not worth investing in. But that’s not what we have here: In the worst-case scenario for Democrats, this race is highly competitive, which everyone already concluded long ago.