A Poll Says California Wants Smaller Government. L.A. Shouldn't Buy It.

The same report from the Public Policy Institute of California finds majorities backing state climate action and calling immigrants a benefit.

A slim majority of Californians told a pollster they'd take a smaller state government and a lower tax bill. The finding comes from an August report by the Public Policy Institute of California, which breaks the state into 46 distinct regions and which CalMatters walked through in its WhatMatters newsletter.

Here's what that preference runs into. Five of the measures on November's statewide ballot deal with taxes, and the largest of them would charge billionaires a one-time tax to shore up health care spending. An Angeleno filling in those five ovals isn't answering a question about the size of government in the abstract. They're deciding, five separate times, whether to pay for one named thing.

That's why I think the smaller-government line is the least load-bearing sentence in the whole report, and the report itself is where I'd go to prove it. The same survey found majorities who say immigrants are a benefit to California and who want the state acting on climate change. State action on climate isn't free, and it doesn't get cheaper by being funded through something other than a tax.

Eric McGhee, PPIC's policy director and a senior fellow there, told CalMatters the result is "an interesting quirk of the state's politics given how Democratic the state is."

Slim is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Ask me to treat it as a mandate and I'd want two things first: the percentage, and the exact wording of the question.

The geography in the report is sturdier, and more interesting. Orange County was once treated as the cradle of the modern conservative movement in this state and this country. McGhee now puts the core up north instead — the suburbs northeast of Sacramento and the Red Bluff and Redding area, which he called "the heart beat of conservatism in California today," a stretch that sometimes calls itself the State of Jefferson.

Now the strongest thing anybody can say back to me, and it isn't weak. Californians are tired of paying. Utility bills and insurance premiums have gone one direction for years, the tax line is the one line a voter thinks they can move, and a survey respondent hears "lower taxes" and answers with the household ledger in front of them, not a theory of the state.

The same report complicates that. The Bay Area leans furthest left and is the most pessimistic about the broader economy, and Bay Area respondents also reported the least worry about covering their own bills. Gloom and squeeze aren't tracking each other. If the mood were really the arithmetic, those two numbers would move together.

So my read shifts, partway. The fatigue is real, and I'd take it seriously — as a bill problem, not as an ideological one. A Democratic majority in Sacramento that reads this finding as instructions to shrink itself has misread its own voters; a majority that reads it as a warning about what a household pays every month has read it correctly, and has a harder job.

The survey asked Californians what sort of government they'd prefer. In November they get asked what they'll fund, five times, with the billionaire health care tax at the top of the pile. I'd trust that answer over this one.

Source: calmatters.org, retrieved September 5, 2026.