California voters aren’t confident the state’s high-speed rail project will ever be finished, but they’re not ready to give up on it either.
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.
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.
“There definitely is this sense that the state can't do big things,” said Andrew Acosta, a veteran California Democratic campaign consultant. “Californians would like to see it happen, but show me the last project that came in on time or under budget.”
That sentiment is reflected in the poll, as 38 percent of Democrats said their support is contingent on the project keeping to its current budget.
But, in the short term, President Donald Trump's incessant hammering of a project beset with construction delays and cost overruns could be doing California officials a favor. His Federal Railroad Administration yanked $4 billion in Obama- and Biden-era grants last month, following a barrage of attacks from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, congressional and state Republicans.
“This project was Severely Overpriced, Overregulated, and NEVER DELIVERED,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social, the day the federal funding was revoked. “Not a SINGLE penny in Federal Dollars will go towards this Newscum SCAM ever again.”
Jack Citrin, a political science professor at UC Berkeley and partner on the poll, said the partisan divide over whether California should continue the project reflects a broader trend on issues that have federal connections, like electric vehicle policies.
“Any of these questions that smell of Trump, the Democrats are going to be pushed in the opposite direction,” Citrin said.
Newsom and high-speed rail backers, including powerful labor unions, have countered the Republican crackdown with a proposal to guarantee $1 billion in funding annually through the state’s cap-and-trade program. Democratic voters’ continued support for state funding could bolster their argument as negotiations over how to divvy up revenue generated by cap-and-trade auctions heat up with less than a month before the end of the legislative session.
Those are signs that even without federal help, high-speed rail isn’t going anywhere in the short term.
Democratic lawmakers will likely face another reckoning sooner rather than later over a project that was originally slated for completion by 2020, and is now expected to open its initial line connecting Bakersfield to Merced in 2033, with no projected date for final completion. The rail line’s price tag is now estimated to cost up to $128 billion, nearly four times its original $33 billion projection.
But Citrin said the results show that Democrats remain hopeful about high-speed rail, even if they have doubts.
“I think a lot of this support shows that hope springs eternal,” he said.
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