Polls Show That Maybe Calexit Ain’t a Bad Idea

“Democracy,” H.L. Mencken once wrote, “is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” Mencken probably would feel right at home among Californians in this age. Or, perhaps more accurately, among the Californians who haven’t left yet.

According to a new poll from Politico and its partners, California voters want graft and fraud on a massive scale to continue. And lucky for them, they’ve elected a governor who can deliver! For example, slightly more than six in ten Californians want Gavin Newsom to keep funding the high-speed rail project that hasn’t laid a single mile of usable track in 17 years — even though most of them realize they’ll never see it operate:

Nearly two-thirds — 62 percent — of voters say that California should continue bankrolling the planned rail line from the Bay Area to Los Angeles after the Trump administration clawed back $4 billion in federal grants last month, according to an exclusive POLITICO-Citrin Center-Possibility Lab poll.

The poll revealed a clear partisan divide among the more than 1,400 registered voters surveyed, as just 21 percent of Democrats said it’s time to pull the plug, compared to 45 percent of independents and 62 percent of Republicans. But that doesn’t mean liberal Californians believe it’s any more likely that they’ll be able to ride from Southern California to San Francisco in their lifetime.

Just 27 percent of Democrats said there’s a high likelihood the project will be completed, roughly matching the 23 percent of their conservative counterparts who believe California officials can finish the first high-speed rail line in North America.

For some reason, Politico offers this as a conclusion to that data:

That seemingly counterintuitive outcome offers a lesson for Gov. Gavin Newsom and the candidates vying to replace him who’ve doubled down on their support: It’s time to put up or shut up.

Bwa-hahahahaha. How cute! Politico thinks this means that voters will hold HSR backers accountable for failure, when it means exactly the opposite. Not only has the project failed to meet any of its milestones or even put one car on a high-speed rail line of any length in 17 years, but there’s no prospect that the situation will change at any fixed point on the time horizon. The federal government just clawed back $4 billion in funding, and the state won’t get any more subsidies for at least the next three years. And yet these voters want the state to keep pouring good money after bad — all of it now in debt-increasing bond issues — for a system that probably will never connect Fresno to Bakersfield, let alone LA to San Francisco. 

Politico sees this as an ultimatum, when the poll actually hands the boondogglers a blank check. 

That’s not the only political insanity that emerges from Politico’s polling. Despite a massive budget crisis on their hands — and that same expanding debt from the HSR project, not to mention a looming pension crisis too — Californians want to foot the bill for medical coverage of illegal aliens. Again, the results show that federal cutoffs of such subsidies haven’t discouraged Californians from even more red ink:

In a survey of 1,445 registered voters, 29 percent of respondents said they believe the state should continue to provide subsidized health care through its Medi-Cal program to undocumented immigrants, even if doing so comes at the expense of other programs. That marks an increase from the 21 percent of voters who supported the idea in an April poll.

In fairness, Politico offers at least some sobering context for this result:

Through its Medi-Cal program, California has offered Medicaid to undocumented people in some form since 2016, but significantly expanded coverage during Gov. Gavin Newsom’s time in office. By January 2024, every low-income person in the state, regardless of immigration status, had access to the full suite of Medi-Cal benefits.

The resulting growth of the Medi-Cal population has contributed to huge cost increases for the program. In the past year, Medi-Cal ran over its budget by 7.5 percent, forcing the state to spend more than $6 billion more to keep the program solvent. The overrun helped drive the state into the red, leaving lawmakers and the governor to deal with a $12 billion budget shortfall. They opted to cut back Medi-Cal for undocumented patients, chipping away at the universal coverage that has been a pillar of Newsom’s legacy.

What impact has this had on California voters? Er …

Thirteen percent of respondents agreed that the state should fully or partially roll back its Medi-Cal offerings for those in the country illegally — a decline from 17 percent in April. 

Good. And. Hard.

Realistically, we aren’t going to boot California from the union in a “Calexit,” of course. However, it won’t be long before Newsom and his successors begin demanding bailouts from the fiscal and infrastructure crises that these policies will create. California voters will expect the other 49 states to indemnify them against their own stupidity. When that fails, Californians will start raiding capital and property within the state in “fair share” policies to subsidize their boondoggles and absurd giveaways. That has already been happening for the last few decades, and it’s why middle-class and entrepreneurial capital have fled the state over the past few years 

Calexit, in that sense, is already underway. And with it goes not just the means to bolster the state’s economy but also most of its common sense as well. 

Editor’s note: What happens in California unfortunately does not stay in California. That’s especially true of Greasy Gavin Newsom, whose leadership would prove utterly disastrous if he achieves his presidential ambitions. That’s why we focus so much time, attention, and analysis on Newsom and the ‘Golden State,’ because we must demonstrate the utter failure of progressive policies and leadership before it’s too late.

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