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Highlights
- 61% of Californians polled say California would be better off if it peacefully seceded
- 77% say California should control its state borders “more like a country”
- 63% support using hardball tactics in the U.S. House to gain autonomy
- Californians now feel more Californian than American overall
About the Poll
We commissioned the January 2025 Independent California Poll from YouGov.
The poll surveyed randomly chosen California adults between January 6 and 14. Some dates that may be relevant:
- Jan 3: New U.S. Congress sworn in
- Jan 6: Fourth anniversary of United States Capitol attack
- Jan 7: Start of deadly Los Angeles wildfires
- Jan 20: Inauguration of Donald Trump as U.S. President
This is the second Independent California Poll. This poll repeats several general questions from our February 2024 poll, but the bulk of its questions are about policy proposals that would make California more autonomous. See topline results and crosstabs from the Februrary 2024 poll.
This article focuses on topline (overall) results. We plan to publish crosstabs later.
See the bottom of this article for our full Methodology and the exact wording of questions.
Peaceful Secession
61% of poll respondents believe that peaceful secession from the U.S. would make Californians’ lives better. Support for this view increased slightly since February 2024 (though within the margin of error):
However, 62% of those polled believe that peaceful, legal secession from the U.S. is impossible:
The format of this poll question is deliberately challenging: we pit a factual statement about how the Philippines peacefully left the U.S. against a common trope about the U.S. Civil war deciding a legal question about secession, and ask respondents which they agree with more. We chose this format to mirror the state of discourse about secession in the U.S.: if someone brings up peaceful secession in a conversation, someone is likely to pop up and say, "didn't we fight a war about that?"
Other poll wordings, such as "do states have a right to secede?" tend to poll near majority support.
Special Autonomous Status
66% of Californians polled said that California would be better off than it is now if it negotiated special autonomous status within the U.S.
Two questions that are new in this poll show that this Californians fully intend to seek autonomy from the U.S.:
66% of those surveyed said California should create a permanent state commission dedicated to helping the state gain more autonomy from the federal government.
63% said that California would be justified in using hardball tactics in the U.S. House (such as refusing to vote for the budget or other must-pass bills) in order to force Congress to grant California more autonomy.
More Californian than American
While Californians' opinions on secession and autonomy remained stable relative to February 2024, their sense of their own identity has shifted significantly.
In February 2024, despite expressing that autonomy and/or peaceful secession would be best for Californians, poll respondents indicated that they still felt more American than Californian overall. Now they report the opposite.
About half of respondents in both polls said they feel equally Californian and American.
More Trust in State Government
Like in February 2024, Californians overall trust their state government somewhat more than the federal government. However, the percentage of Californians who trust both equally has dropped by a statistically significant amount.
Perhaps it is unsurprising that Californians find the incoming Trump administration more distinguishable from California's state government than the Biden administration.
However, this shift matters. Americans are undergoing a broad loss of trust in not just government but institutions in general. If Californians can't localize the systemic problems they face within the federal system and instead come to believe that "the government" or "democracy" is fundamentally broken, what would be the point in Californians seeking greater autonomy for their own democracy?
Still a Nation-State
73% of Californians polled believe it is at least somewhat accurate to refer to California as a "nation-state."
California has been the 5th largest economy in the world since 2017.
Federal Land and Water Infrastructure
62% of Californians polled believe they would be better off if nearly all federal land and water infrastructure in California were transferred to state and local government.
There is an apparent (but not quite statistically significant—see Methodology) 6% drop relative to February 2024.
The poll also asked, in two separate questions, if the federal government should transfer nearly all its land and water infrastructure. Californians polled showed clear majority support for both proposals: 58% for land, and 56% for water infrastructure.
However, only 50% of respondents said "Definitely" or "Probably" to both questions, indicating a 12-point gap between "better off" and "should."
Rather than directly contesting the idea of federal control of California land and water, California policy makers might be wise to focus on particular categories of title transfers that would have a clear benefit for Californians.
For example, they could advocate that fire-prone federal land near inhabited areas (e.g. the Angeles National Forest) be transferred to the state so that Californians living in those areas would be at less risk of losing their homes in a wildfire.
Policy Proposals
Californians showed clear majority support for 10 out of 11 proposed policies that would make California more autonomous. These include the autonomy commission and transfers of federal land and water infrastructure, discussed above.
Here are the 11 proposed policies, ranked by degree of support:
Question numbers are included so that you can easily find the phrasing of each question in the full poll questionnaire at the bottom of this page.
We plan to devote an entire article to each proposed policy. Here, we're just going to summarize the top three.
Control State Borders Like a Country
California has 16 Border Protection Stations along its borders with Arizona, Nevada, and Oregon. These
stations are primarily used to inspect plant material for agricultural pests.
77% of Californians polled said California should use its Border Control Stations more like a country would, by checking for illegal guns, drugs, and other contraband.
In particular, checking for guns at the border could have a significant impact on public safety. California has much stricter gun laws than in neighboring states (especially Nevada). Right now, California basically relies on the honor system to keep criminals from bringing illegal assault weapons over California borders.
Double the Rainy Day Fund
California's constitution provided for a special fund to store tax revenue from good years so that the government can continue to function during economic downturns.
76% of respondents endorsed a proposal to double the maximum size of the Rainy Day Fund, "to reduce California's dependence on the federal government during a major natural disaster
or economic downturn."
This proposal is actually a bill in the California legislature, ACA-1. (We've let the author of the bill's staff know.)
Close the Equal Protection Loophole
67% of Californians said that California's constitution should be revised so that initiatives can't violate the principle of equal protection under the law.
The poll question explains how Prop 8 (2008), the same-sex marriage ban, deliberately violated the equal protection rights of gay Californians (as defined by California courts) by amending the California constitution's definition of equal protection itself. California courts were powerless to do anything about it, and Prop 8 was eventually struck down in federal court five years later.
Closing the equal protection loophole would effectively make California independent from the federal court system in its ability to uphold the principle of equal protection.
This matters because courts appear to be uninterested in applying the principle of equal protection to transgender people, and appears to be backpedaling on gay rights as well. For these groups of Californians, equal protection in federal courts is no protection at all. In California, groups have already come very close to putting an initiative on the ballot that would violate the equal protection rights of transgender children. They plan to try again for the November 2026 ballot.
Playing Hardball in the House
While pro-autonomy policies enjoyed broad support, many of them require federal cooperation to put into practice. For example, California's legislature can't simply legislate that the federal government transfer its land and water infrastructure; that would require an act of Congress.
What leverage do Californians have to get federal cooperation, given that Californians are under-represented in the Senate and their votes don't affect the outcome of presidential elections?
One answer is for Californians to use their full, proportional power in the U.S. House of Representatives, by blocking the budget and other must-pass legislation unless Californians' demands for autonomy are met.
This is an unconventional strategy that could potentially lead to a government shutdown, but it is also probably the best strategy Californians have. Are they willing to use it?
Yes! As we saw above, 63% of respondents said they thought Californians are "justified in using hardball tactics in the House to gain greater autonomy for California, since Californians are systematically under-represented in other parts of the federal government."
We tried to come up with two concrete scenarios where Californians might endorse playing hardball, one to prevent mass deportations in California, and another to ensure Californians gets enough control over their federal health care tax dollars to implement a unified health care system in California.
However, neither scenario found as much support as the general idea of playing hardball to get more autonomy. 56% of Californians were in favor of refusing to pass a budget that enables mass deportations in Calfiornia. Only 53% were willing to do so to block the budget or another must-pass bill to allow California to use its federal health care dollars to create a unified health care system.
At the time the poll went into the field, ensuring full disaster funding for California was not nearly as topical as it is today (the L.A. fires started the next day). This is an issue where California's Congressional delegation might come together to ensure Californians' access to their own federal tax dollars; even California Republicans are openly skeptical of tying conditions to wildfire aid in California.
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DonateMethodology
According to the pollster:
Field Period: January 06, 2025 - January 14, 2025
YouGov interviewed 540 California residents who were then matched down to a sample of 500 to produce the final dataset. The respondents were matched to a sampling frame on gender, age, race, and education. The sampling frame is a politically representative "modeled frame" of California adults, based upon the American Community Survey (ACS) public use microdata file, public voter file records, the 2020 Current Population Survey (CPS) Voting and Registration supplements, the 2020 National Election Pool (NEP) exit poll, and the 2020 CES surveys, including demographics and 2020 presidential vote.
The matched cases were weighted to the sampling frame using propensity scores. The matched cases and the frame were combined and a logistic regression was estimated for inclusion in the frame. The propensity score function included age, gender, race/ethnicity, years of education, and homeownership. The propensity scores were grouped into deciles of the estimated propensity score in the frame and post-stratified according to these deciles.
The weights were then post-stratified on both the 2024 and 2020 presidential vote choice as well as a four-way stratification of gender, age (4-categories), race (4-categories), and education (4-categories), and a single stratification on education (4-categories). Finally, an individual stratification was applied to place of birth in order to produce the final weight.
The margin of error for this poll is 5.6%, which is to say, for any percentage of total responses that our poll comes up with (e.g. the percentage of people who say California should control its own borders like a country), there's a 95% chance that Californians' real opinion is within 5.6% of that.
When comparing this poll with the previous one, the rules are a little different: the polls need to differ by at least 6.6% for us to be 95% confident that the increase or decrease is real. (Essentially, there are now two degrees of freedom, but it's also a one-tailed test.)
You can see the full poll questionnaire at the bottom of this page.
