Did Trump Push California Over the Edge?

Did the election of Donald Trump finally push California over the edge? Backers of a longstanding secession effort hope so. The “Calexit” backers submitted a petition this week to the California secretary of state calling for a 2019 vote on whether California should secede from the United States. Always a fringe movement in the nation’s most populous state, the secession effort gained steam following an election that hit Californians with the sting of disenfranchisement.

On Election Day, Californians went for Hillary Clinton two to one over Trump. Though there are more registered voters in California than the combined populations of 46 states, the state has an undersized impact on presidential elections. A resident in a place such as Wyoming has nearly four times the voting power of a Californian thanks to the Electoral College, which favors sparsely populated rural states.

The same formula leaves California similarly underrepresented in Congress, a fact readily apparent in the tax disparity that annually has California giving billions more to the federal government than it gets back.

The backers of Calexit hope to stoke resentment over the disparity into action at the polls. If their initiative is approved by voters, it would force a vote in March of 2019 on whether California should become a "free, sovereign and independent country." They have six months to gather valid signatures from 585,407 registered voters — 8 percent of the total votes cast for governor in the 2014 general election — to qualify the measure for the ballot. Now, the world’s sixth largest economy, Calexit backers argue California can afford to go it alone.

The secession campaign is not just about protesting Trump's election as president, said Louis J. Marinelli, president of the Yes California Independence Campaign.

The campaign is also about "the flawed fiscal system in which California has lived for decades subsidizing the other states ... while we lack adequate funding for health care, education, social services, infrastructure, and other quality of life issues here in California" and "the flawed political system in which California has lived for decades, one where nothing gets done and progress is held back by hundreds of millions of non-Californians who do not share the same worldview as us, and who have a different culture, a different set of priorities, and different plans for the future," Marinelli said.

"We in California could get so much more done if we could free ourselves from the shackles of statehood," Marinelli added.

And there’s the rub for California’s liberals. It’s not entirely that their candidate didn’t win on Nov. 8. It’s that the nation elected a leader who espouses beliefs antithetical to the values of most Californians. Even California’s Orange County, which hadn’t voted for a Democratic president since the Great Depression, chose Clinton over Trump. The election brought the gulf between the Golden State and the heartland into stark relief.

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On the same day the nation elected a president who promised steep tax cuts for the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans, Californians voted overwhelmingly to extend a tax targeting its wealthiest residents. The nation chose a president who promises to deport millions of immigrants, even as California voters came out in favor of bilingual education in public schools. And the country elected a president who opposes gun restrictions the day California passed a ban on high-capacity magazines and a background check for the purchase of bullets.
Facing a record drought, catastrophic wildfires and rising tides, California leads the nation with the strictest environmental laws, but the nation elected a president who called climate change a hoax.

While the nation gave Republicans control of the White House, House of Representatives and the Senate, Democrats are likely to have a super-majority in California when the final ballots are counted this month.
Gov. Jerry Brown jokingly called for a border wall around California under a Trump presidency, but for many Californians, talk of secession is simply un-American. Indeed, no prominent politician has endorsed the concept of secession.

They are, however, gearing up for a civic war.

Sen. Barbara Boxer is trying to abolish the Electoral College. This week, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a candidate for governor in 2018, urged California colleges and universities to commit to becoming sanctuaries, vowing to protect undocumented immigrants from deportation. In Los Angeles, where roughly a fifth of residents face the threat of deportation and where more than half of public school students risk losing their parents to deportation, city and school district officials are exploring how far they can go in resisting Trump’s immigration policies. The Los Angeles City Council is weighing the potential loss of federal funding against the benefits of becoming a sanctuary city to protect the immigrants who make up a sizable chunk of the local labor force.

Following the election, State Senate leader Kevin de León and Assembly speaker Anthony Rendon issued a statement summing up California’s sense of disenfranchisement: “Today, we woke up feeling like strangers in a foreign land, because yesterday Americans expressed their views on a pluralistic and democratic society that are clearly inconsistent with the values of the people of California.”

City News Service contributed to this report. Photo: Public Domain