It’s a common situation where a state has big, politically conservative but sparsely populated rural and small-town areas that are outweighed by state politics by heavily populated, mostly liberal/progressive urban enclaves. California is one such place, and in the 2024 election things seem to have grown even more divided between the coastal urban enclaves and the eastern and northern parts of the state. The same situation holds sway in Colorado, where we lived for many years and where the Denver-Boulder Axis runs roughshod over the much more conservative eastern plains and much of the western slope. So it’s understandable that some of the rural and small-town folks feel their states’ governments do not well serve them and might seek to leave, to either form a new state or to join a neighboring one where the prevalent political climate is more to their liking. This happened in California, where the State of Jefferson movement proposed to form a new state out of the northern counties and the southern tier of Oregon. In Illinois, the conservative southern counties are looking to break away from the domination of Cook County and Chicago.
It seems like this issue comes up every few years or so, generally after an election. It’s doing so again now.
A movement in a myriad of rural counties across deep blue states such as Illinois and California to split off and form new states appears to be gaining some steam in the wake of the Nov. 5 election.
Conservative residents of the rural regions are taking note of their peers fleeing to lower-taxed and less-regulated red states but they are ready to stay put — pining for a divorce with the urban sectors of their state.
A group dubbed the New Illinois State has drafted a new constitution and championed plans to “Leave Illinois Without Moving.” On Election Day, seven rural counties in Illinois voted to contemplate splitting off from the state.
“Voted to contemplate”; that’s an interesting turn of phrase. Sort of like “endeavor to persevere.”
Some in California’s northern tier have been pushing the State of Jefferson for some time now, but it seems there’s a new movement to break up the once-Golden State.
Out in California, a similar movement has taken root as well. The New California State organization hopes to splinter off the counties outside the Bay Area, Sacramento and Los Angeles.
“I’m so flipping excited,” Paul Preston, who founded New California State, told the Wall Street Journal.
Preston bashed the Golden State to the outlet as a “one-party communist state, and technically, they have seceded from the Union already.”
Note there’s an important difference between this and the dust-up we had from 1861-1865 when 13 states tried to break away and form another nation. The movements in Illinois and California aren’t proposing to leave the United States (although there’s one group in New Hampshire that proposes just that) but just to redo the state border map to form new states.
And don’t the citizens supposedly have the right to self-determination?
See Related: New Poll: 66 Million Americans Support Idea of ‘National Divorce’
New Hampshire Takes a Second Bat at Legislation to Secede From the United States
Louisianans Win Bid to Secede From Baton Rouge and Form the City of St. George
While people have the right to get the government they want, good and hard (apologies to H.L. Mencken), the Constitution makes it difficult to carve a new state out of one or more existing ones. The last time it happened was during the Civil War when West Virginia split off from secessionist Virginia and remained in the Union. Under the Constitution, the legislatures of any states involved would have to vote to allow the redrawing of borders or the secession of counties to join a new state. Then Congress has to vote to accept the new states. Article 4 of the Constitution describes the relationships between the states, between states and the federal government, and how new states are admitted to the Union. Article 4, Section 3 states:
New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.
Given that most of these redrawing of lines would result in some pretty safe Republican jurisdictions, it would be a job to get such approval through a narrowly divided Congress.
People should have the right to self-determination. The Constitution makes allowance for it, in that it specifically allows for the re-drawing of state lines, given the process designed. There would have to be significant pressure put on Congress by the voters to make this happen, as the Constitution also makes sure that this can’t be done capriciously.
But when you look at the 2024 election results by county in places like California, Oregon, and Illinois, one has to wonder if this is an idea whose time has come.
