Splitsville: separatist movements are gaining steam in blue states

Matt McCaw doesn’t want to live anywhere but in Oregon. But during the pandemic he felt like he was living under tyrannical rule imposed by the state’s progressive majority in metro Portland. The school that his six children attended closed for more than a year due to a state mandate — and they received just four hours of online instruction per week. His church was forced to close, and his business selling textbooks suffered because school districts were buying online curricula, not physical books. Mask and vaccine mandates were ubiquitous; McCaw couldn’t even take his wife out to dinner to break the monotony, because all the restaurants were takeout-only.

“I thought there would be a huge political backlash against all that,” he says. “But Oregon voters doubled down — they voted the same people back in.”

He didn’t lose hope or move to Florida. Instead, he joined Greater Idaho, a movement that seeks to move the Oregon/Idaho border, allowing red Idaho to absorb most of culturally conservative eastern Oregon. “There is no winning back Oregon,” says forty-six-year-old McCaw, a resident of Crook County in central Oregon. “Are we going to continue to be a minority in our own state or is there some other way forward for us?”

Residents of eastern Oregon aren’t alone in their desire to separate from progressive urban enclaves that dictate how they are governed. According to Grant Dahl, co-host of the Secession Speakeasy podcast, there are separatist (most groups don’t like to be called secessionist) movements in Oregon, Illinois, Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Louisiana, California, Washington, Minnesota, New York and Pennsylvania.

The goals aren’t the same in each place — and some movements are far more serious than others. Dozens of counties in Illinois and Oregon, for example, have already voted in favor of some form of separation from their current states. And in a few states, like Texas, where the Texas Nationalist Movement is seeking “Texit,” the goal is full-blown independence from the US. The separatist movement is more evidence of the growing divide between progressive cities and small towns. But are any of these separatist movements likely to result in new borders, new states or even new countries?

Since the general election in 2020, thirteen counties in eastern Oregon have voted in favor of joining Idaho in non-binding advisory ballot initiatives. Douglas and Josephine counties, in southern Oregon, vote Republican but rejected the idea of joining Idaho. McCaw says the average margin of victory in the counties that have voted to date is 58 percent. He says the ballot initiatives have been useful to help members of the public understand that it’s not just the voting habits of a county that dictate whether its population wants to join Idaho. Largely agricultural and rural, eastern Oregon is culturally similar to Idaho in a way that the south of the state is not.

Despite the group’s success at the ballot box, Oregon Democrats — who have a supermajority in the state House and Senate since the November election — haven’t been receptive to letting the rest of the area join Idaho. The legislatures of both states, plus the US Congress, would need to approve changes to the border. Legislators in Idaho seem open to the idea — in 2023, the Idaho House passed a non-binding resolution calling for Greater Idaho talks, 41-28.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has called for a “national divorce” on several occasions — most recently after the election in response to progressive plans to obstruct the Trump agenda. But it’s unclear how many other congressional Republicans would be receptive to plans for a Greater Idaho or any other separatist movements. For his part, McCaw says there is no “plan B” and his group will have to find a way to convince Oregon Democrats that a divorce is also in their best interests. “We don’t want Portland values forced on us,” he says. “Let us get our own form of government and we’ll all be better off.”

According to Paul Preston, who says he is the governor pro tempore of New California — a territory that, if it ever became a state, would include all of present-day California save for the metro areas of Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento — the Greater Idaho movement is misguided. Preston, a retired educator and radio host from Orange County, thinks the Oregonians and other disgruntled citizens ought to form new states that can be added to the Union based on Article 4, Section 3 of the Constitution, which affords Congress the power to admit new states.

Preston is feeling optimistic about the possibility of splitting off from Old California after Donald Trump’s electoral college landslide. He believes Congress will admit New California as the fifty-first state in March or April, and thinks that other new states, like New Illinois, will follow soon thereafter. Call him a dreamer and he’ll tell you that you don’t understand California. “California is controlled by liberals but it’s not the liberal state people think it is,” he says. “California is actually a deep red state… but we have a real monoparty system here. We are no different than North Korea or China in that regard… and some of the Democrats here are actual communists.”

Preston’s group has published a list of ninety-five grievances, inspired by the twenty-seven the Founding Fathers published in the Declaration of Independence, and says more are on the way. He says that “tyrannical” California Democrats have denied the citizenry a republican form of government and insists that Mexican drug cartels control California elections. According to Preston, Trump won California in a landslide in both 2020 and in 2024. He says his group has evidence the tally was 15.8 million votes for Trump compared to just 4.6 million for Joe Biden. “We don’t have all the numbers yet from this election because they’re still counting votes and cheating,” he says. “If Kamala Harris got a million votes here, she’d be lucky.”

Preston says that after New California becomes a state, new elections will be held and Old California will be “forced to obey the Constitution and allow a republican form of government.” He believes that Governor Gavin Newsom, who has yet to comment on the New California movement or that of several other similar splinter groups in the state, will be forced to resign. Preston claims that his group has met with dozens of Republicans in Congress and even a few Democrats, and thinks they have broad support on Capitol Hill.

“We will stand our ground here in California,” he says. “Before the end of the decade there will be six to eight more states, and this movement will not stop. It’s something we need to do to save the nation.”

Most separatist groups are officially nonpartisan but are largely populated with conservatives. But Yes California, a group that advocates for California to secede from the Union in a “Cal-exit,” is more left-leaning and gained in popularity following the 2016 election of Donald Trump, when a Reuters/IPSOS poll revealed that one in three Californias supported secession as a response to Trump’s election.

G.H. Merritt, chairman of the board of directors of New Illinois, another wannabe new state that includes everything in present-day Illinois but Cook County (Chicago), loves everything about her home state except its government. “It’s a beautiful place, there’s wonderful people, the richest farmland in the world, but we have a government that is doing its best to destroy everything,” says Merritt, a resident of Lake County, north of Chicago, whose background is in the nonprofit sector. “Illinois is a dumpster fire,” she says. She points out that Illinois consistently gets poor marks for corruption and has lost population in ten consecutive years and, in 2023, lost more residents than any other states but California and New York.

A separatist group allied with the New Illinois movement has organized nonbinding advisory ballot measures, and thirty-three of the state’s 102 counties have voted to explore separating from Cook County, many of them with overwhelming margins of 70 percent or more. Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat who reportedly has presidential ambitions, is understandably cool toward the idea. “The governor has deliberately mischaracterized what the movement is,” says Merritt. “We aren’t trying to kick Chicago out of Illinois; we are trying to kick ourselves out of Illinois.” Like Preston, she’s optimistic that this new state will be formed, perhaps soon, because Chicago owes more than $37 billion to its employee pension funds and is effectively broke. She thinks New Illinois may inspire other divorces but says, “I don’t think we will end up with like 200 states.”

In Texas, the Texit movement led by the Texas Nationalist Movement advocates for full independence from the United States, as does a New Hampshire group called NHexit, one in the Bayou State called Free Louisiana, and the Alaskan Independence Party, among others. Senator Ted Cruz weighed in on the question, saying he’s “not there yet” on Texit in 2021. But he warned that if Democrats “end the filibuster, if they fundamentally destroy the country, if they pack the Supreme Court, if they make DC a state, if they federalize elections and massively expand voter fraud, there may come a point where it’s hopeless, then I think we take NASA, take the military, take the oil.”

In the Pacific Northwest, disgruntled residents of eastern Washington want to form a new state called Liberty. A pair of Republican legislators introduced a bill in 2021 to this effect but it went nowhere. In 2013, the 51st Initiative in northeast Colorado aimed to form a new state called Northern Colorado from eleven counties frustrated with Denver-centric rule. Six of those counties voted in favor of forming a new state but the group hasn’t been in the news lately.

Within the last several years, some voters in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan wanted to join Wisconsin; conservatives in Maryland plotted to form a new state called Western Maryland; there was an initiative to split the Golden State into six Californias, and an effort to create a state called Jefferson in northern California went nowhere. Recently the East Dakota Secession Movement has sought to establish a new state in western Minnesota; separatists in New York want to establish a new New Amsterdam; and the Second Vermont Republic plans to restore the independent status of the Vermont Republic (1777- 91). And of course, without involving any secession issues, many Democrats still want to make the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico states.

Do any of these movements have a chance to succeed? And what do they say about the growing divide between urban and rural Americans? Congress won’t allow bits of the country to secede without a fight and the consent clause in Article 4 of the Constitution requires a new state to have the “consent of the legislatures of the states concerned as well as of the Congress.” Separatists point to the example of West Virginia, which was allowed to join the Union during the Civil War without the consent of Virginia.

Ryan Griffiths, a professor of political science at Syracuse University who is the author of a forthcoming book on secessionist movements, says the West Virginia precedent is a “stretch” because at the time it was formed, Virginia had seceded from the Union. He says the likelihood of any fifty-first state emerging from present movements is unlikely, but concedes that the popularity of these groups has increased in recent years. “The engine of these groups is the growing polarization in America,” he says.

Griffiths doesn’t buy the argument that smaller governing units are necessarily more effective. But I’m not sure that more than 330 million Americans can productively coexist forever within the existing fifty states given our diversity and Balkanization. I’m from Western New York, where New York City’s power and influence have long been widely resented. I’ve lived in Chicago, which is despised by most of the rest of Illinois, and central Oregon, which has little in common with Portlandia. And I now reside in Florida, where all the angry conservatives who didn’t join separatist movements up north seem to have moved. Borders are routinely redrawn at the municipal level. Redrawing state boundaries is a much more difficult process, but, as James Madison said, “the people are the only legitimate fountain of power,” and so ultimately the choice is ours.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s January 2025 World edition.