LOS ANGELES — The Los Angeles Times released a new USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll today that said 55 percent of registered voters in the state would vote “yes”on Proposition 60.
The poll numbers come seven weeks before Californians will vote on whether or not the porn industry should be subject to a mandatory condom law.
Of those polled, 32 percent said they would vote against Prop 60, while 13 percent had no answer.
The Times said the online poll of 1,909 registered California voters was conducted Sept. 1-8 in English and Spanish. It has a margin-of-error estimate of 3 percentage points.
Free Speech Coalition spokesman Mike Stabile told XBIZ today that the numbers don’t compare with the “70 percent figure” that the Yes on Prop 60 campaign is boasting about and that the numbers will start shifting as more voters are becoming aware about the motives behind the measure.
Numerous papers in the state have stated that they are against Prop 60, Stabile said. (The San Diego Union-Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Fresno Bee, the Sacramento Bee, the Mercury News, the East Bay Times and the Orange County Register all have urged a “no” vote on the proposition.)
“We’re not particularly concerned about the poll,” Stabile said. “Most haven’t heard our argument. On the surface of the initiative it looks like a progressive measure, but it is not.”
Stabile, who noted that polls sometimes are skewed by the way the question is phrased, said there is plenty of time for the public to be educated on what Prop 60 is all about. “It’s not about safer sex,” he said.
Crunching down the numbers further, the Times poll found a 20-point gender gap among respondents — 64 percent of women polled supported the measure, while only 44 percent of men did.
According to the Times poll, the measure had strong backing from minority voters, with 58 percent of blacks and 63 percent of Latinos supporting it.
