In an interesting “what if” over at Breaking Views, Martin Hutchinson asks if California would work better if it were broken up into four.
The Business Insider’s Joe Weisenthal, meanwhile, gives some reasons why this won’t happen:
This is a political scientist’s late night fantasy and doing this might actually solve some political problems, but in the end it wouldn’t work. The first state to go would be Greater LA. You see, the Hollywood liberal types may love to support government spending and immigration, but the moment the entire burden fell on them to support the rest of the population they’d scream bloody murder. You know they would. And it’s probably a gloss-over to just say that the San Diego state would be solidly “conservative” just because there’s a lot of military and socially conservative Hispanics there. There’d be huge public support tensions over spending and government safety nets. Beyond that, national Republicans would never go for this, since you’d essentially be creating three new Democratic states (it sounds like Central would probably be Republican), giving Democrats permanent dominance in the US Senate.