SOFT SECESSION

Redistricting is a start, but California must lead an economic uprising.

- BY CLARA JEFFERY

IN 2013, venture capitalist Tim Draper launched a “Six Californias” ballot initiative.

The upshot was that with some 40 million people, more than the population of the 20 smallest states combined, California was too big, too diverse, to be “efficiently” governed. So why not, Draper argued, break it up into six new “startups,” a.k.a. states? Instead of two senators, we erstwhile “Californians” would get 12.

Draper's scheme was part of a long tradition—since California was admitted to the Union as part of the Compromise of 1850, there have been more than 220 proposals for it to divide or secede—but derided as a Silicon Valley ploy to create a libertarian deregulation zone. (Tellingly, the Bay Area state was to be named “Silicon Valley.”) And aside from the feasibility of making it happen, state and federal constitution-wise, people worried that it would cleave four rich populous states from two poorer rural states (fair) and weaken Democrats’ voting share in the Senate (in retrospect, nah). Draper's measure gleaned valid signatures from some 753,000 people—more, it must be said, than the populations of America’s three smallest states—but in California, that wasn't enough to get on the ballot.

After the 2016 election, which put the anti-majoritarian provisions of the US Constitution very much front of mind, Draper came back with a simpler proposal—three Californias, or Cal 3. This initiative got enough signatures to head to voters, but the day before the 2018 ballots were to be printed, the state Supreme Court blocked the measure—what about things like existing water treaties, the justices worried—and Draper eventually gave up.