A Fifth of Americans Want a ‘National Divorce’ Between States

L eft-wing pundits were predictably appalled last month when Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a conservative provocateur, called for “a national divorce” She tweeted:

Greene is an expert on how to troll liberals, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore the sentiment she expressed. A new Ipsos poll of 1,018 adults, conducted in mid-March, found 20 percent of Americans agreeing about a divorce between the states. Support ranged across the spectrum — 16 percent of Democrats, 25 percent of Republicans, and 20 percent of independents.

The number of Democrats shouldn’t surprise anyone. As NR’s Jim Geraghty reported in 2017, Donald Trump’s election spawned a “Calexit” movement that deployed 8,000 volunteers in an unsuccessful attempt to put California secession on the ballot. At the time, a poll commissioned by Reuters found that 32 percent of Californians (mostly Democrats) backed the idea.

Of course, a national divorce isn’t going to happen. Our bloody Civil War put an end to national secession as a serious proposition. But uncoupling can happen at a more local level. Urban neighborhoods upset with poor services and failed efforts to stop crime sometimes try to separate from the larger city and incorporate as a new town. Such an effort by the Buckhead section of Atlanta passed a Georgia state-senate committee this month before narrowly losing a floor vote.

There are also active movements to have parts of some sprawling, diverse states join a neighboring state they are simpatico with. The thinking is that this would ease tensions, defuse the war of ideology between Left and Right, and allow more policy experimentation, since each state would have residents more in sync with one another.

The most advanced such movement is in Oregon. Oregon’s eleven counties in the easternmost part of the state are furious that “woke” Portland and the university town of Eugene dominate the state’s politics. The state has not elected a Republican governor in 40 years. Coastal liberals have passed laws that the state’s inland residents resent. Limits on logging have decimated the timber industry, leading to mass unemployment in some counties. Portland liberals are accused of treating Eastern Oregon as a wilderness playground while local communities there are shortchanged and ignored.

Indeed, all eleven counties involved have passed referendums calling for a merger with neighboring Idaho.

Last month, the Idaho House of Representatives passed a nonbinding motion calling for formal talks between the Idaho and Oregon legislatures to discuss the merger.

Senator Dennis Linthicum of Klamath Falls, Ore., says his colleagues will want to ignore the move, but they do so at the risk of completely alienating eastern Oregon. Such boundary changes aren’t unprecedented, he points out — West Virginia was carved out of Virginia in 1863 during the Civil War.

Idaho State Representative Judy Boyle says there are practical reasons for her state to back a merger with Idaho. She says it could reduce the amount of illegal drugs coming into Idaho from Oregon, which has abolished many of its narcotics laws.

Idaho’s Democratic House Minority Leader Ilana Rubel finds the idea crazy and has called it “self-segregating by ideology.” But isn’t that what the “woke” voters in Portland have been doing for decades — adopting policies on crime, homelessness, and taxes that seem almost designed to drive its middle-class residents out of the city, with many of them moving to Idaho?

Nonetheless, it’s unlikely that Oregon, California, or Texas will ever be divided. It’s even more unlikely that any state or group of states would cut ties to the rest of the nation and become a separate country.

But the debate on both ideas is healthy. To what extent should we let political boundaries established many decades ago curb our imagination and prevent us from creative solutions to our problems?