Internal differences aren’t enough of a reason to split a state. Internal differences combined with huge size is. With 40 million people, California is almost twice the population as the next largest state (Texas, with 26 million). As a single entity, California is a very large unitary government (our state governments are hardly confederations of county governments, rather our counties and municipalities are creatures of our state governments).
Very large states should be able to split. It is not necessary to define what is meant by “very large” beforehand. But, clearly, each of the resulting states would still have to be at least average size (6.4 million), perhaps at least 1.5 times average size (9.5 million).
And, we don’t want anything like gerrymandering. The split lines have to make sense.
My idea for splitting California is four states: Los Angeles County, San Francisco (the bay area), Northern California (capital Sacramento) and Southern California (capital San Diego). This would make two city-states (very liberal), and two moderate rural-urban mix states.
The only other places I see this working are: Chicago (Cook County plus surrounding metro counties) and New York City (the five counties thereof). This would make two more city-states and two more moderate rural-urban mix states.
Germany is a federal republic and it has a couple city-states (Berlin and Hamburg).
Speaking of city-states, Washington, D.C., is too small to be a free standing city states. The populated part of the district should be joined to Maryland for voting in federal elections (Senator and Congressman as well as President), with no separate 3 electoral votes for the remaining depopulated district.
Not a bad start...i think you can just knock out a few counties in cali...just look at the pres. vote by county and separate out the blue counties
.wouldn”t be surprised if some blue counties would go red either..