California Gov. Gavin Newsom unveils his proposed $286 billion 2022-2023 state budget during a news conference in Sacramento, California, on Jan. 10, 2022. | Rich Pedroncelli/AP

SACRAMENTO, California — As the state grapples with a budget deficit and immigration raids, California voters are increasingly supportive of giving health insurance to people regardless of their immigration status, a new POLITICO-Citrin Center-Possibility Lab poll found.

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.

Another third of the voters polled was supportive of the program within limits, saying that if cuts to Medi-Cal are necessary the state should prioritize U.S. citizens and others in the country legally.

The rise in support is notable as it comes against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s ongoing immigration crackdown that has brought raids to the streets of Los Angeles and some of the state’s farmlands. The poll was also conducted as the state prepares to scale back health care coverage for undocumented immigrants in an effort to close a daunting budget deficit.

Beneath the top level findings, the poll results underscore voters’ complex relationship to the state’s huge population of undocumented immigrants and deep divides over the issue that run along racial, political and generational lines.

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.

Undocumented adults will no longer be able to enroll starting in January and those already in the program will lose access to some benefits, such as dental care, and will be charged $30 monthly premiums.

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. And a third said the state should offer subsidized care as long as doing so doesn’t cut into Medi-Cal benefits for citizens, similar to the response in April.

The number of people who feel the state should never have offered Medi-Cal to undocumented immigrants fell from 31 percent in April to 26 percent in the recent poll.

The poll probed other aspects of voters’ feelings about illegal immigration. More than six out of 10 people said it was important to stop the flow of illegal immigration across the country’s southern border, while 46 percent said they wanted immigrants who entered the country illegally to have a path to citizenship. Over 70 percent said the economy would be hurt if the undocumented workforce were deported.

The results reflect the complicated role undocumented immigrants play in California’s economy and broader society, said Jack Citrin, a veteran political science professor at UC Berkeley and partner on the poll.

“There’s a distinction people make between controlling immigration on one hand, versus how should the people already here be treated,” Citrin said.

“The Medicaid question is a part of that. What do you do with the people already here? I think there’s an empathy element to it.”

The survey found that a separate group of policy influencers, POLITICO Pro subscribers well versed in the state’s policy issues, were more supportive of Medi-Cal for undocumented immigrants than the voters surveyed. Nearly three quarters of the policy influencers polled said they support the state continuing to provide health care either to everyone or with some restrictions. For general voters, that number was 62 percent.

Support is highest among Gen Z voters, nearly half of whom said undocumented immigrants should continue to receive free Medi-Cal. Boomers are the least supportive, with only 16 percent saying the state should keep paying for the program.

There was also a wide disparity among ethnic groups, with Hispanic voters recording the highest support at 42 percent and white voters notching the lowest at 21 percent. Support among both groups was up from April.

And a huge gap persisted along political lines. While 81 percent of Democratic voters said they think the Medi-Cal program for undocumented immigrants should continue, either unfettered or with some conditions, only 32 percent of Republicans reported the same sentiments. Over half of Republicans, meanwhile, said the state was wrong to have offered health insurance in the first place, about the same as in April.

This project consists of two separate opinion studies of the California electorate and policy influencers in the state, fielded by TrueDot, the 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/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/minus 3.7 percent.