California isn’t all Democrat. Plenty don’t want to be a part of Newsom’s clown show.
And now a major California movement could see the state split in two.
Two More Counties Join The List
The movement to split California in two has been pronounced dead so many times by Sacramento Democrats that its persistence has become almost a running joke among those who have watched it for years. This week, the joke became slightly less funny for the state’s Democratic leadership.
The boards of supervisors in Yuba and Sutter counties — side-by-side rural counties in the Sacramento Valley, north of the state capital — voted to formally support Assemblymember James Gallagher’s proposal to split California into two states. The counties join a growing list of northern and inland California jurisdictions that have been quietly building toward exactly this kind of formal action for more than a decade, accelerating in recent years as the sense of political irrelevance among rural Californians has reached a breaking point.
Gallagher, a Republican representing East Nicolaus who is also running for Congress in District 1, first introduced the idea last summer in the aftermath of Proposition 50, which redesigned congressional district boundaries in ways that rural Republicans say effectively voided their representation. “I think it was really the red line that many people have said enough is enough,” Gallagher told reporters. “That’s why you’re seeing these local governments consider and support this new idea.”
The practical obstacles to actually creating a new state are formidable. The California Legislature — overwhelmingly Democratic in both chambers — would need to consent. Then Congress would need to approve it. Neither is happening in the near term. But that is not, in a sense, the point of what Yuba and Sutter counties did this week.
The Grievance Is Real — And Decades Old
The desire among northern and rural California communities to escape the political gravity of the Bay Area and Los Angeles is not new. It dates to at least 1941, when the State of Jefferson movement emerged in the border counties of northern California and southern Oregon as a semi-serious regional separatist effort. It has flared periodically in the decades since, most recently during the COVID pandemic, when rural northern California counties experienced some of the harshest enforcement of state public health orders from Sacramento while feeling they had no meaningful voice in crafting them.
“We don’t count in Northern California,” Yuba County Supervisor Andy Vasquez said when the county first joined the State of Jefferson movement in a previous iteration. “What Yuba County is just saying is that we can’t survive this way.”
The frustration is structurally grounded. California’s representative system — both in the state legislature and in the U.S. Senate — means that two of the three senators who currently speak for a state of 40 million people are drawn from the Bay Area, and the overwhelming majority of the state’s legislative power flows from the coastal urban corridor. A farmer in Sutter County, a logger in Shasta County, or a rancher in Modoc County casts a vote with essentially no prospect of affecting state policy. The resulting alienation is not a political construct. It is a mathematical reality.
The same phenomenon that produced Brexit in the United Kingdom and has fueled regional sovereignty movements across Europe is visible in microcosm in California’s interior: communities that feel permanently outvoted deciding that the political arrangement is no longer worth maintaining.
What It Would Actually Take — And Why It Matters Anyway
Chris Micheli, an adjunct professor at McGeorge School of Law who studies California legislative procedure, was direct about the current prognosis. “Governor Newsom doesn’t play a role in this,” he said. “It only requires the consent of the two houses of the Legislature, but considering that the Legislature is controlled strongly by Democrats in both houses, we do not anticipate this resolution to move forward.”
That assessment is almost certainly correct. Splitting California into two states is not happening in the current legislative session, or the next one, or probably the one after that. Sacramento Democrats have no incentive to create a new state that would, in all likelihood, send two additional Republican senators to Washington and shift the Electoral College calculus against their party permanently.
But the significance of what Yuba and Sutter counties did this week is not about the odds of near-term success. It is about the signal it sends — to Sacramento, to the rest of the country, and to rural California communities that have watched their political influence erode for thirty years. When a critical mass of counties formalizes their desire to leave a state, it creates pressure that cannot be entirely dismissed even when the legal pathway is blocked. It is exactly what supporters of the movement say it is: people who are finally mad as h*ll, and not willing to put up with it anymore.
