LOS ANGELES — Weeks after fires ravaged the region, many Angelenos were dissatisfied with Mayor Karen Bass' leadership, a new poll has found.

A little over 40% of registered voters in the city said they thought Bass did a poor or very poor job in responding to the fires, while just 19% characterized her response as excellent or good, according to a new survey from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, co-sponsored by The Times. A little more than 1 in 5 city residents thought she was doing a fair job and the remainder had no opinion.

Bass has "been wounded," said Mark DiCamillo, director of the Institute of Governmental Studies poll and a longtime California pollster. "Clearly, the effect of the fire is damaging her image, and it's drawing all this real strong negativity in certain quarters."

"The fire, unfortunately, is such a major event, I don't think it's going to be easy for voters to push this aside," DiCamillo said. "I think it'll linger for many, many months."

Bass bounded into office in 2022, buoyed by a broad coalition and Democratic wall of support that helped her drub billionaire mall mogul Rick Caruso, despite Caruso massively outspending her.

As a candidate, Bass pledged to stem the city's sprawling homelessness crisis, which badly soiled her predecessor Eric Garcetti's legacy. And she undoubtedly thought her job performance would be judged on her ability to stanch the exposed suffering on L.A.'s streets.

But two years into her tenure at the helm of the nation's second-largest city, fate and ferocious winds have dealt Bass a very different hand.

The Democratic leader's success — and prospects for a second term — will almost certainly hinge on fire recovery, and the impressions Angelenos have already formed during this city-defining disaster.

The Palisades fire killed 12 people and destroyed thousands of homes, rendering the coastal enclave virtually unrecognizable. As that fire burned out of control in the city of Los Angeles and western parts of the county, the Eaton fire exploded to the east, devastating the town of Altadena. Bass and the Los Angeles City Council are responsible for the city of L.A., whereas the county Board of Supervisors has jurisdiction over Altadena, which is unincorporated.

After being out of the country when the fires erupted Jan. 7, Bass floundered in her initial response — freezing up when confronted by press, dodging criticism from her since-removed fire chief and straining relations with her own recovery czar and other leaders. Last week, Bass foes launched a campaign to recall her from office with financial support from Nicole Shanahan, a Silicon Valley philanthropist and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s former running mate.

"The Mayor is focused on recovery which right now is months ahead of expectations and she is going to continue pushing it forward," said Bass spokesperson Zach Seidl, citing a long list of relief and rebuilding efforts for wildfire survivors, the record rate of utility restoration in the Palisades and the rapid pace of debris removal.

Other local officials had similarly anemic performance ratings in the poll, with 21% of city voters describing the 15-member City Council's fire response as excellent or good and 19% of county voters saying the same about the five-member county Board of Supervisors.

But respondents were much more negative about Bass than they were about either of those legislative bodies, with 28% saying the Board of Supervisors was doing a poor or very poor job and 27% saying the same of the City Council, to Bass' 41%.

Los Angeles County voters surveyed were generally warmer toward Gov. Gavin Newsom, with 35% saying they thought he did a good or excellent job, while 32% thought he did a poor or very poor job. An additional 16% thought he did a fair job, and 16% had no opinion.

The outlook toward the governor, who is also a Democrat, was more affectionate within city limits: 40% of L.A. residents approved of his wildfire response, whereas 26% thought he had done a poor or very poor job.

Given the public scrutiny and negative media attention Bass has weathered, it was unsurprising that her approval ratings had suffered, said Ange-Marie Hancock, a former USC political science and international relations department chair, who now leads Ohio State University's Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.

"The critiques have really focused on her leadership and not the City Council and not the supes," Hancock said, using a colloquial term for the county Board of Supervisors.

Despite the Los Angeles mayor's comparatively limited powers, Bass has become the face of a fire response that many Angelenos view as flawed, Hancock said.

"People who've been through this kind of trauma of the fires can certainly focus on, OK, 'That's the reason this happened,' as opposed to the more complicated truth, which is L.A., like most other cities, is not set up for these kind of climate change-driven fires."

And alongside substantive critiques, race and gender also probably play a role in some of the attacks on Bass, who is the first female and second Black mayor of the city. She has become something of a bugbear to right-wing media in the weeks since the fires and faced explicitly racist and gender-based blitzing on social media.

But Angelenos also had a muted view of Bass' ability to move the city forward in the fires' aftermath.

Just over half of city residents said they had "not much" or only "a little" confidence in Bass' ability to help guide Los Angeles through its recovery, while a little more than 1 in 3 residents had a "great deal" or "some" confidence in her leadership. Just over 1 in 10 said they had no opinion.

Bass' performance was viewed most negatively in the city's northeast and east and on the Westside. Ratings were less negative in South L.A. and the Harbor area.

Demographic data for solely city residents was not available, so countywide data is applied.

Across Los Angeles County, home to 1 in 4 of California's registered voters, older residents were somewhat more likely to say Bass was doing a good job, with about a quarter of those 50 or older saying she was doing an excellent or good job. She received the lowest marks from younger residents.

There was a gender divide, with women ranking Bass' performance less negatively than men did.

Black voters in Los Angeles County viewed her a bit less negatively than others, with 23% saying she was doing an excellent or good job, whereas Asian and Pacific Islander respondents were harshest, with just 12% ranking her performance as good or excellent. White respondents gave her higher marks, with 20% saying she had done an excellent or good job responding to the fires, and Latinos responded similarly, with 18% scoring her fire response as excellent or good.

County voters with college or graduate educations were much more likely than others to think Bass was doing a poor or very poor job.

There was also a correlation between income level and views on how Bass performed during the fires.

Roughly half of county voters making more than $100,000 a year thought Bass had done a poor or very poor job responding to the fires, whereas those making between $40,000 to $99,999 were less critical, and county residents making less than $40,000 were the least critical of her job performance.

Ratings aligned in the opposite direction for Newsom, with county residents more likely to approve of his fire job performance if they made more money or had higher levels of education.

Unsurprisingly, there was a strong relationship between job performance and party affiliation, with Democrats being far more likely to be less critical of Bass, independents grading her a bit more sternly and Republicans viewing her most negatively. The breakdown of Newsom's ratings was also highly partisan.

Angelenos gave far higher marks to local fire departments, with 73% of county residents saying they thought the Los Angeles County Fire Department had done an excellent or good job and 71% saying the same for the Los Angeles Fire Department.

The last time The Times polled on Bass' favorability was on the eve of her 100th day in office, when half of city residents said they approved of the job she was doing, while just 14% said they disapproved, according to a Suffolk University/Los Angeles Times poll conducted in March 2023.

While hardly an apples-to-apples comparison (the 2023 Suffolk poll asked about overall job performance, versus the fire-specific questions in the new poll), the contrast speaks to the deep reservoir of goodwill Bass had early in her tenure, and the erosion of some of that support.

Bass will be on the ballot again in 2026 — a reelection campaign that, before the fires, had looked like a glide path. It remains unclear whether a serious challenger will enter the race, but if one does, Bass could have a real fight on her hands.

Caruso, her 2022 opponent, has fiercely criticized Bass' leadership since the fires and publicly flirted with a second bid for mayor, though he has yet to say whether he will make another run.

The Berkeley IGS poll was conducted online in English and Spanish from Feb. 17 to Feb. 26, more than a month after the fires broke out.

It surveyed 5,184 registered voters in Los Angeles County. This total included oversamples of 272 registered voters living in the Palisades fire zone and 293 registered voters living in the Eaton fire zone. The margin of error may be imprecise; however the survey's estimated margin of error for Los Angeles County voters is 2 percentage points, and the margin of error for voters in the city of Los Angeles is 3 percentage points.

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