California Republicans are now pushing a proposal to split the state into two. While that will obviously never happen, it does highlight just how untenable the political situation in California has become under Democratic single-party rule.
The proposal from Assembly Minority Leader James Gallagher would cut the state into two, with the “Democratic” state making up most of California’s coast and the “Republican” state taking most of the non-coastal counties. It won’t go anywhere, and Gallagher likely knows that given his tongue-in-cheek description of it as a “two-state solution.”
It is important to note, though, that the reason this is even (regularly) discussed in the context of California and almost never, say, Texas or New York, is because of how California Democrats have run the state over the past decade-plus. California is governed by coastal elites for coastal elites, and the inland counties are left to bear the brunt of the state’s destructive policies and indifferent attitude toward their livelihoods.
As an example, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) recently bragged about how the state is “#1” in, among other things, farming. It’s not unfounded: The Central Valley of California produces $17 billion worth of crops per year, producing a quarter of the nation’s food with less than 1% of its farmland. And yet Newsom and California Democrats have been strangling that farmland with air quality and water regulations. The state has flushed water that farmers need out to sea to please environmental activists, instituted stricter groundwater regulations on farmers trying to compensate for that flushed water, and forced big and small farms alike to spend wildly on new vehicles to meet the state’s ridiculous emissions standards.
Coastal Democrats are also forcing rural Californians, including those in the state’s mountainous areas, to electrify their school bus fleets. Those school districts are being forced to transition to weak buses that can’t even travel the distance needed in those areas without stopping to be charged, and doing it on roads that don’t have charging stations.
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The contempt California’s coastal Democrats have for the millions of inland county Californians is clear as well. Assemblyman Isaac Bryan responded to the two-state proposal by tweeting and later deleting a post implying that the millions of inland Californians would be too dumb and poor to run a proper state, unlike California proper, which has the highest poverty rate in the country and a looming budget crisis under Democratic rule.
California’s coastal Democrats have recklessly pushed ahead with policies that are burdening inland residents the most, all while they sneer at those residents. The California Democratic Party is the single-worst state party in the country, and it has fostered a growing political divide between coastal and inland counties that threatens the political and social stability of the state’s future.