Eliminating poverty should be the nation's top priority, higher than fighting terrorism, establishing democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan or even rebuilding cities devastated by natural disasters, a new national poll suggests.

Pollster Sergio Bendixen says the survey results show "a sea change in public opinion." Chronicle photo by Penni Gladstone

New California Media, a San Francisco coalition of ethnic media, commissioned a poll released Thursday of whites, blacks, Asians and Hispanics about how Hurricane Katrina influenced the way people view poverty, race relations, climate change and government response.

No other poll has sought the opinions of such a diverse pool of respondents on these subjects. Other surveys have treated race as an issue only between whites and blacks -- if they asked about race at all.

Bendixen & Associates, which conducted the poll, interviewed 1,035 randomly selected people in English, Spanish, Korean, Vietnamese, Cantonese and Mandarin from Oct. 14 to Oct. 21.

Most respondents -- 77 percent of blacks, 69 percent of Hispanics, 60 percent of Asians and 46 percent of whites -- said the government should finance the hurricane relief effort by pulling troops out of Iraq as soon as possible.

"I see this as a historic moment, a sea change in public opinion on these issues," said pollster Sergio Bendixen.

In contrast to polls over the past decade indicating that Americans were not optimistic about ending poverty, Bendixen said his shows that the hurricane has put the issue back on the national agenda.

There are historic parallels to this shift, said Michel Gelobeter, executive director of Redefining Progress, an Oakland think tank. Public outcry over the 1900 Galveston, Texas, hurricane and flood that killed thousands of people and over the 1927 flood of the Mississippi Valley that displaced hundreds of thousands helped bring about social and government change, he said.

"This country needs a U-turn," said Gelobeter, who was not involved in the poll. "We need to be a nation building a great society at home, not overseas."

Other polls this fall, which tended to include only registered voters but also drew on pools of 800 to 1,500 people, produced more mixed answers to similar questions.

Less than a third of respondents to a Pew Research Center poll preferred that the government pay for hurricane area reconstruction by cutting spending in Iraq, while the rest chose higher taxes, domestic spending cuts or deficit spending. In a Newsweek poll, 57 percent of respondents said that after dealing with the hurricanes and replacing the FEMA chief, the federal government would be better able to respond to future natural disasters

Some 35 percent of respondents to an ABC poll said the slow government response to Hurricane Katrina will hurt race relations in the long term; 21 percent said it would improve them, and 39 percent felt it would have no effect. And in a CBS-New York Times poll, 59 percent of respondents said race was not a factor in the government's slow response in New Orleans.

Poll respondents were selected at random and interviewed over the phone. For some, pollsters randomly dialed phone numbers from census tracts where certain ethnicities account for more than 10 percent of the population and from lists of people whose names indicate they are likely from a particular ethnic group. They then verified the respondents' race and ethnicity.

The margin of error for the full sample is three percentage points, but once results are broken down by ethnic and racial subgroups, the margin is six percentage points.

Many respondents to the New California Media poll said they could not rely on local and state governments, the Federal Emergency Management Agency or the U.S. armed forces to protect their families in a natural disaster.

"Government needs to take back its significant role and protect the public," said Sandra Hernandez, San Francisco's former director of public health and now the chief executive officer of the San Francisco Foundation, the philanthropic organization that hosted Thursday's news conference where the poll results were presented.

In the Bay Area, Vietnamese Americans sent truckloads of fish sauce, noodles, soy sauce and other staples to Mississippi and Alabama, and they are helping displaced residents rebuild. Local black churches also gathered donations of cash and goods and sent volunteers to provide relief.

Respondents agreed on the need to reduce poverty -- 58 percent of blacks, 43 percent of Hispanics, 40 percent of Asians and 36 percent of whites -- but they disagreed over the influence of race on this issue.

More than two-thirds of poll respondents agreed that "life is a lot more difficult for poor people in the United States than I ever imagined" -- 84 percent of blacks, 77 percent of Asians, 74 percent of Hispanics and 67 percent of whites.

But when the same question was asked about blacks, agreement dropped across all ethnic groups. Just 47 percent of Asians and 34 percent of whites agreed that "life is a lot more difficult for blacks in the United States than I ever imagined."

Respondents were sharply divided by race on the issue of looting during the hurricane's aftermath, a gap reflected in other hurricane polls and in the national debate.

Fifty-seven percent of African American respondents said that the people who took food and television sets from stores were trying to take care of their families, while 46 percent of whites, 40 percent of Asians and 44 percent of Hispanics said such people were looters.

©2005 San Francisco Chronicle

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