SACRAMENTO (September 10) —The evolving reaction of the contingent of outnumbered Republican officeholders in the state’s capital to Governor Gavin Newsom’s plan to gerrymander California’s political map now includes a proposal to split the state in two.
The concept, to a certain extent, revives a now discarded move by San Bernardino County to break off from California, which the county’s voters narrowly approved almost three years ago but which the politicians who sponsored it subsequently rejected as both politically and financially unfeasible when they examined what secession would entail.
Governor Newsom and the Democratic supermajorities in the California State Senate and California Assembly last month approved a $283 million special election in November to have the state’s voters override the map that was put in place in 2021 by the state’s non-partisan redistricting commission setting the boundaries for the state’s 52 Congressional seats. Already, under that map, the Democrats hold a commanding 44-to-9 lead over the Republicans among the members of the House of Representatives from California.
Earlier this summer, Texas Governor Greg Abbott and the Republican-dominated Texas legislature in Austin undertook to redraw the Lone Star State’s political map, such that in the 2026 midterm election, the 26-to-12 advantage the Republicans hold over the Democrats will be likely to increase to 31-to-7. Abbott, a Republican, and his allies were responding to requests by President Donald Trump’s supporters, who are concerned that the slim majorities the GOP enjoys in both the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate that were established in the 2024 election with President Trump’s return to office four years after his 2020 defeat by Joseph Biden might be eroded or lost in 2026. The Texas Republicans responded by redrafting their state’s Congressional District Map such that five Congressional districts currently served by a Democrat had their borders changed. In making those shifts, portions of neighborhoods in those districts which are heavily populated by Democrats were moved into an adjoining district where there are already an overwhelming number of Republicans, and neighborhoods from contiguous districts in which the Republicans greatly outnumber Democrats were brought within that district’s borders. This was done in such a way that the strong Republican majority districts from which the Republican voters were imported into the Democratic-leaning districts retained Republican majorities. In this way, Abbott and his Republican cohorts believed the Republicans stand a realistic chance of picking up five more Congressional seats from Texas alone.
In California, Governor Newsom, as committed to the Democratic cause as Abbott is loyal to Republicanism, is determined to deny, if he can, President Trump the luxury and advantage of having his party hold a majority in the legislative branch of government. Newsom in response to what Abbott achieved in Texas, set about manipulating California’s Congressional map in an unabashedly naked partisan manner, justifying what he and his fellow and sister Democrats in the California Assembly and State Senate were doing by saying they were “fighting fire with fire.”
In California, the Democrats faced a hurdle the Republicans in Texas did not have to overcome, that being Proposition 20, passed by the state’s voters in 2010, which took the drawing of the state’s political maps out of the hands of politicians and gave that responsibility to a nonpartisan citizen redistricting commission. Proposition 20 had a provision in it which allows a majority of the California legislature to offer a substitute map to what the commission draws up if the map is submitted to voters statewide for approval.
That is what Newsom did, and on August 21, the California legislature, in both houses of which more than two-thirds of the members are Democrats, voted to place Proposition 50 on a special statewide ballot in November. Proposition 50 asks the voters to approve a redraft of the state’s Congressional map. That map was redrawn by Newsom and it essentially alters twelve of the state’s Congressional districts in such a way that in five of those where Republicans are now in place, the voter registration numbers that currently favor the GOP will be changed to advantage Democrats. Those five Republican members of Congress – Doug LaMalfa, the Republican incumbent in California’s 1st Congressional District, incumbent Republican Representative Kevin Kiley in the 3rd Congressional District, incumbent Republican Congressman David Valadao in the 22nd Congressional District, incumbent Republican Representative Ken Calvert in the 41st Congressional District and incumbent Representative Darrell Issa in the 48th Congressional District – will most likely be voted out and their Democratic opponents voted in with the November 2026 election.
California’s Republicans were outraged and railed about how unfair it was.
Republican Assembly Leader James Gallagher lamented what Newsom was orchestrating. “No public hearings. No transparency. Complete secrecy,” Gallagher said. “Gavin Newsom’s Democrat allies are behind closed doors, rigging California’s congressional districts so politicians can choose their own voters. These are rigged maps drawn in secret to give Democrat politicians more power. These maps shred the fair, transparent process voters demanded. The independent commission spent months gathering public input, holding 196 public meetings, hearing 3,870 verbal comments and collecting 32,410 written submissions before finalizing the current maps. Democrat politicians are throwing that work in the trash for a rigged scheme cooked up behind closed doors. This is a mockery of democracy. If they can neuter the commission here, they can neuter it anywhere. Californians should choose their representatives, not the other way around.”
Former California Republican Party Chairwoman Jessica Millan Patterson called what was going on a “political power grab”
District 23 State Senator Suzette Martinez Valladares, a Republican, on August 14 stated that she believed that the redistricting mid-decade would “disregard the voters’ mandate for a fair and transparent process. Governor Newsom is moving full speed with his politically motivated plan to upend that process with biased lines drawn behind closed doors by politicians and political consultants.”
19th District Senator Rosilicie Ochoa Bogh said, “Californians deserve a redistricting process that is fair, transparent, and free from political gamesmanship. Weakening or discarding the independent commission, even temporarily, betrays the trust voters placed in us and undermines the integrity of our democracy.”
Republican 32nd District State Senator Kelly Seyarto said he opposed what he said was “an egregious legislative package to gerrymander California’s congressional districts.”
36th District Assemblyman Jeff Gonzalez said, “Politicians should not be allowed to draw their own district lines. Meanwhile, my constituents in Imperial, Riverside and San Bernardino Counties are struggling. And yet, this body is more interested in gerrymandering than solving real problems. Californians in my district tell me every day they feel forgotten and they’re right. We should be investing in hospitals, food banks, wildfire protection and jobs, not playing partisan games.”
District 47 Assemblyman Greg Wallis, a Republican, told the Sentinel, “Prop 50 is a step backward for democracy.”
Meanwhile, the Democrats and their support network have tapped into the substantial political war chest at their disposal and begun a media advertising blitz promoting Proposition 50. With the 10,396,792 registered Democrats in in California outnumbering the 5,896,203 registered Republican among the total 23,206,519 voters in California, it is widely anticipated that the governor’s ploy to boost his own party and undercut the Republicans at the national level will succeed in November.
Exasperated by the way in which Newsom, who has 2028 presidential aspirations, and his network are exploiting the advantage that accrues to the majority party,
Gallagher, as the leading Republican in the Golden State, began casting about for a way to neutralize the Democrats. He floated the concept of breaking California into two states, proposing to create from the whole of California a coastal state that includes most of the state’s populous areas inhabited by a majority of liberals and progressives, along with an inland state that’s primarily rural and populated with a majority of conservatives.
Calling his countermove a “two state solution,” Gallaher outlined his plan in Assembly Joint Resolution 23, which urges the creation of a U.S. state comprising 36 inland California counties. Making the division, he said, was important to head off the implication of Proposition 50, which he said would “silence rural voices and rig the political system forever.”
Assembly Joint Resolution 23 calls for the current California Legislature to consent to the formation of the new state and asks for Congress’s consent, which is required under Article IV, Section 3, of the U.S. Constitution.
“The people of inland California have been overlooked for too long,” Gallagher said.
He is prepared to cede Humboldt, Mendocino, Lake, Sonoma, Napa, Solano, Yolo, Marin, Contra Costa Sacramento, Alameda, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Monterey, San Benito, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Ventura, Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego to the Democrats to form what would be the most populous but geographically smallest of the two reformed states. The second state, which would be larger in terms of area but less densely populated than its western neighbor, would consist of Alpine, Amador, Butte, Calaveras, Colusa, Del Norte, El Dorado, Fresno, Glenn, Imperial, Inyo, Kern, Kings, Lassen, Madera, Mariposa, Merced, Modoc, Mono, Nevada, Placer, Plumas, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Joaquin, Shasta, Sierra, Siskiyou, Solano, Stanislaus, Sutter, Tehama, Trinity, Tulare, Tuolumne and Yuba counties.
The resolution cites California’s size, uneven population saturation and previous efforts at secession involving some of the state’s northernmost counties and San Bernardino County’s 2022 measure as the impetus for the inland counties’ desire to realize “an equitable share of state funding and resources” by breaking away from California.
Gallagher, who represents an Assembly district in the Sacramento Valley in north central California, perhaps did not fully understand or appreciate the issues raised or resolved in the San Bernardino County secession effort.
The prime mover in the movement to have San Bernardino County and its residents make an exodus from California was developer Jeff Burum, one of the most prolific donors to Republican politicians and Republican-affiliated political causes in San Bernardino County.
Claiming that San Bernardino County and its cities were not getting their fair share the tax money from Sacramento collected by the state, Burum convinced the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors to place Measure EE, calling for San Bernardino County to secede from California, on the November 8, 2022 ballot.
On election day, at the county’s precincts and using mail-in ballots, the county’s voters passed Measure EE, calling for San Bernardino County to secede from California, with 212,615 or 50.62 percent of the county’s 420,054 voters in favor of leaving the Golden State and 207,439 or 49.38 percent remaining as Californians.
Having achieved the consent of San Bernardino County’s voters to form their own state, one which would have encompassed 20,105 square miles or more territory than is contained in the states of New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island combined, San Bernardino County officials did not act upon that authority by beginning the de-annexation process. After temporizing for more than nine months, in August 2023, the board of supervisors, at a cost of $192,400, commissioned Blue Sky Consulting Group to do an analysis of what San Bernardino County becoming the 51st State of the Union would actually entail.
While Burum and to a lesser extent the supervisors that supported him in getting Measure EE on the ballot and passed maintained that San Bernardino County was being given short shrift by the state’s Democrat Party-dominated leadership, the report showed that in actuality, San Bernardino County in the majority of cases has been receiving no less money on average than most other counties in the state and that with respect to a fair number of funding categories, it receives more and sometimes substantially more than other counties.
In particular, the Blue Sky report dispelled the widespread misrepresentation that the state was stiffing the county by imposing upon it unfunded mandates that it provide service. When the state has undertaken what is referred to as realignment by which responsibility for certain programs or services formerly carried out by the state was transferred to the 58 counties, in doing so the state made funding transfers to cover the counties’ increased costs in meeting those mandates, according to Blue Sky. These realignments in the main pertained to health, mental health, and public safety purposes, and Blue Sky reported that Sacramento passed through sufficient money to cover the increase in costs, such that none of counties, including San Bernardino County, went unreimbursed by the state for carrying out those programs.
While some counties in the state with regard to certain programs received more funding than others, San Bernardino County has wrung from the state government more money for a large number of crucial undertakings than a majority of other counties, according to the statistics Blue Sky cited.
In this way, the report severely undercut Burum’s premise that San Bernardino County and its taxpayers are being shortchanged on their “fair share” of state and federal revenue. Blue Sky documented, in an examination of the taxes paid by the county’s residents and businesses in comparison to those paid by their counterparts elsewhere in the state, that in category after category of spending by the state government, it is San Bernardino County and its residents who have been freeloading at the expense of taxpayers in other counties. In particular, according to Blue Sky, it was entities such as the liberal and Democratic-dominated Santa Clara, San Francisco, San Marin and San Mateo counties, with their average annual household incomes of $180,000, $148,000; $158,000 and $180,000, which were subsidizing conservative and Republican-dominated San Bernardino County, with its annual average household income of $50,000.
“Across all sources, over the past three fiscal years, the county has received 9 percent more state funding per person than other counties statewide,” Blue Sky’s 33-page annotated executive summary of its report to the county stated.
Blue Sky’s findings essentially shattered the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors’ and Burum’s dream of having San Bernardino County break off from California to form its own state as politically and economically unfeasible.
As a consequence of the Blue Sky report, San Bernardino County officials have pretty much abandoned the secession effort.
San Bernardino County is the second most populous and economically developed of the 36 inland counties that would comprise the geographically largest of Gallagher’s two proposed states. This would appear to indicate that prospects for that state’s viability as a stand-alone entity would be equally bleak to what San Bernardino County’s odds for converting itself into a state are.
-Mark Gutglueck, reporting from Sacramento