SACRAMENTO, California — Donald Trump’s immigration raids may be backfiring in California, even among Republicans and independents who otherwise support tougher border security, according to a new poll from POLITICO and its partners.
Nearly three-quarters of registered voters in the state — including roughly half of Republicans — said removing millions of undocumented immigrants from the workforce would hurt California’s economy, the latest POLITICO-Citrin Center-Possibility Lab poll found. And roughly 80 percent of voters, including a majority of Republicans, said undocumented immigrants already in the U.S. illegally should remain in some fashion.
That’s despite a sizable majority of California voters, 62 percent, saying it’s important for the U.S. to secure its borders and curb illegal immigration, including 46 percent of Democrats.
About half of California voters favor a pathway to citizenship, while smaller proportions favor eligibility for permanent residency and temporary work permits.
There’s “an impulse of empathy and humanity, and realism about the difficulty and the unfairness of all of a sudden, out of the blue, coming from people who might have been here for 10 years, have families here, et cetera,” said Jack Citrin, a political science professor at UC Berkeley and partner on the poll.
The California poll — conducted in a state that served as an epicenter of Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda — may help explain why the president has sunk underwater on immigration nationally, despite the issue previously being one of his strongest.
Trump had the upper hand politically in 2024, when immigration talks were focused on border security, but Democrats have seized on the issue amid increasingly bold raids in Los Angeles and beyond.
Even some California Republican leaders have said they fear they’ll pay a price if Trump doesn’t pull back. Reports of raids and widespread fear of detentions and deportations, regardless of citizenship status, coincide with data showing Latino voters souring on Republicans.
“Republicans in the state are in a kind of survival mode,” Citrin said. “They’re caught between their loyalty to Trump, and there may be local pressures on them.”
Latino voters are an especially powerful political force in California. Republicans’ 2024 victories in the Inland Empire and Central Valley came as Latino voters swung dramatically toward the GOP after years of voting reliably Democratic.
But Hispanic voters more than any other ethnic or racial group surveyed in the California poll said undocumented immigrants currently in the U.S. should be eligible to apply for U.S. citizenship, at 54 percent, even as roughly 6-in-10 said secure borders are important.
Three-quarters of Hispanic voters said removing undocumented immigrants from the workforce would hurt the economy, including 55 percent who said it would hurt “a lot.”
The survey also gauged the opinion of roughly 500 POLITICO Pro subscribers, who are deeply immersed in state issues. Among that heavily Democratic group of policy influencers, just 44 percent said it was important for the U.S. to secure its borders, compared to 62 percent of all voters and 66 percent of independent voters who said the same.
“The influencers are less concerned about illegal immigrants and more willing to have a stronger belief in their necessity for the economy,” Citrin said. “[Influencers] are more liberal, they’re more Democratic, and they’re more pro-immigration.”
A whopping 93 percent of policy insiders said removing undocumented immigrants from the country would hurt California’s economy. That number dropped to 89 percent among Democratic voters and 73 percent among all voters surveyed.
The POLITICO-Citrin Center-Possibility Lab poll was fielded by TrueDot, an artificial intelligence-accelerated research platform, in collaboration with the Citrin Center and Possibility Lab at UC Berkeley and POLITICO. The public opinion study, made possible in part with support from the California Constitution Center, was conducted in the field between July 28 and Aug. 12.
The sample of 1,445 registered voters was selected at random by Verasight, with interviews conducted in English and Spanish, and includes an oversample of Hispanic voters. The modeled error estimate for the full sample is plus or minus 2.6 percent. The policy influencer study was conducted from July 30 to Aug. 11, among 512 subscribers to POLITICO Pro, and the modeled error estimate is plus or minus 3.7 percent.
