Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama leads Republican nominee John McCain by a large margin in California, and two of the most high-profile ballot measures are on the tipping point between passing and failing, according to a new survey released late Wednesday by the Public Policy Institute of California.

The ticket of Obama and Joe Biden leads McCain and Sarah Palin by a margin of 56-33 among likely voters, a 13-point gain for the Democratic ticket in the last month. Obama and Biden are doing particularly well among women, Latinos, younger voters and independents, according to the PPIC.

But the survey also found that 56 percent of likely voters feel that the campaigns don't spend enough time on the issues that are most important to them. In order, those are the economy with 55 percent, followed by health care, immigration and the war in Iraq, though only 6 percent of likely voters mentioned any of those last three topics.

Only 20 percent of likely voters think the state is headed in the right direction, down 21 points from September 2007. Nearly eight in 10 think the state is in some kind of recession, and only 37 percent believe the recently passed Wall Street bailout package will positively help the state's economy.

Proposition 4, the ballot measure that would require parental notification for a minor getting an abortion, has a narrow 46-44 lead in favor of approval among likely voters, with 10 percent undecided.

Pollsters noted that majorities of polled Democrats and independents are against the measure, but Republicans favor it by 61 percent.

Redistricting measure Proposition 11 continues to have high undecided numbers, with 25 percent of likely voters unsure how they'll decide it. The measure has overall support of 41 percent, to 35 percent against, and the PPIC noted that those numbers had changed little from a month ago.

Approval ratings among likely voters for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, at 47 percent, and the state legislature, at 22 percent, both rose over the last month, perhaps because the budget impasse ended.

But approval for President Bush and Congress in that group both dropped in the wake of the bailout plan's passage, to 20 and 18 percent respectively.

The PPIC's survey, done with funding from the James Irvine Foundation, was based on a telephone survey in English and Spanish of 2,004 California residents between Oct. 12 and 19. The margin of error is 2 percent for questions of the entire sample and 3 percent for questions of likely voters.