California’s secession movement has grown significantly since Donald Trump became the 45th president of the United States. The golden state overwhelmingly disapproved of Trump at the ballot box — nearly 3.5 million more Californians voted for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton than voted for Trump — and a new Reuters/Ipsos poll found that one in three Californians now support the secession movement. (In 2014, only 20 percent of Californians favored secession.)
“Yes California,” the leading political action committee fighting for California’s independence from the union, has capitalized on the shift in public opinion. The campaign committee submitted a proposal to Secretary of State Alex Padilla on Thursday, allowing it to collect the necessary number of signatures to create a ballot measure for the November 2018 election; 585,407 Californians must sign the petition by July 25.
If “Yes California” reaches the signature threshold, Californians will vote on whether to repeal provisions in California’s constitution that outline the state’s relationship to the union. According to California’s attorney general Xavier Becerra in his summary of the initiative, there are two constitutional clauses in question: that “California is an inseparable part of the United States and that the United States Constitution is the supreme law of the land.” At least half of California’s registered voters must participate and 55 percent of those voters must approve the measure for it to pass. If it did pass, it would trigger a vote scheduled in March 2019 to ask voters whether California should “become a free, sovereign, and independent country.”
California’s politicians, meanwhile, are calling for the state to continue to defy federal law in the wake of President Trump’s announced policies on sanctuary cities and immigration enforcement.
For example, Governor Jerry Brown’s State of the State speech this week made clear that California officials will not cooperate with efforts to deport illegal aliens. “We will defend everybody — every man, woman, and child,” Brown said, “who has come here for a better life and has contributed to the well-being of our state.” Local authorities have echoed this sentiment. Immediately following the presidential election, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors wrote a resolution defying Trump’s stance on immigration: “No matter the threats made by President-elect Trump,” the board members wrote, “San Francisco will remain a Sanctuary City.”
California may be the sixth-largest economy in the world, but to successfully resist Trump by seceding from the union is an endeavor unlikely to succeed. After all, it’s not just Californians who decide their state’s fate; two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of states (or a constitutional convention) would have to approve a constitutional amendment allowing it, making the ambitious secession proposal a failure before it even arrives at the ballot box.