California, Subdivided
July 2, 2020
By math. To be fair.
tl;dr
California is an extremely large, populous state.
Mostly, this is cool. We’re an amazingly diverse state that manages to be on the vanguard of all sorts of initiatives. We live together on the Left Coast in remarkable harmony.
When it comes to federal representation, however, it sucks.
We decided to use math to divide California into multiple states that would make things a little fairer.
If you don’t want to read the whole journey, here’s the map we eventually arrived at:
The fairer California comprises 21 states (if you include Orange County). Each new state has a population greater than that of Alaska.
You can also skip to the bottom to see where we landed, or check these out:
Preamble
One fine quarantine morning, we decided to see how many California counties (and their county seats) we could remember.
“Modoc has a county seat? There’s nothing there!”
“The county seat of Orange isn’t Anaheim?”
“There aren’t any cities in Kings County, so it can’t have a county seat. ”
“All counties have to have county seats.”
“What about Siskiyou? There’s nothing in Siskiyou. Oh, Yreka.”
“Where’s Mono county?”
“East side of the Sierras, near Mono Lake.”
“What’s its county seat?”
“That town with the wicked speed trap, got a –ville or –ton or some such in its name. I can’t remember — what is it?”
“Bridgeport.”
“You’ve guessed Visalia already 5 times!”
“I know it’s the county seat of something in the Central Valley, just can’t remember what.”
“San Bernardino County is enormous.”
“Yup, sure is.”
“Must be larger than a lot of states, and 2 million people live there.”
“We should turn it into a state.”
“San Bernardino?”
“All the counties in California that are bigger than states!”
San Bernardino County is larger in area than the 9 smallest states and has more people than the 14 least populous states, so it definitely qualifies as a proto-state.
Many other counties qualify too.
We were surprised how many.
First Try
What should be the criteria to transform California counties into independent states?
In our initial cut, we deemed any county that’s got more area than Delaware or more people than Alaska a state.
For the rest of this post, “bigger than Delaware” means having a greater area than Delaware, while “bigger than Alaska” means being more populous than Alaska.
Back when I was in Alaska, people would say “if Texas gets too uppity, we’ll just divide Alaska in half and make Texas the third largest state.” If Alaska gets too uppity, we’ll just divide California into 52 states and make Alaska the 100th largest state.
Counties that qualify by area: San Bernardino, Inyo, Kern, Riverside, Siskiyou, Fresno, Tulare, Lassen, San Diego, Imperial, Los Angeles, Modoc, Shasta, Humboldt, Mendocino, Monterey, San Luis Obispo, Trinity, Mono, Tehama, Santa Barbara, Plumas
Counties that qualify by population: Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Santa Clara, Alameda, Sacramento, Contra Costa (all over a million), Fresno, Kern, San Francisco, Ventura, San Mateo, San Joaquin
Counties that don’t make either cut: Tuolumne, Madera, Merced, El Dorado, Butte, Sonoma, Stanislaus, Mariposa, Placer, Kings, San Benito, Glenn, Lake, Colusa, Calaveras, Yolo, Del Norte, Nevada, Sierra, Solano, Napa, Alpine, Yuba, Sutter, Amador, Marin, Santa Cruz, Marin
For those keeping count, 30 of California’s 58 counties qualified for statehood all by themselves.
We started drawing maps. The first draft respected geography (like the Sierra Nevada) and combined counties that didn’t make either cut with neighboring counties until they did.
On round 1, we constructed 38 new states from California’s 58 counties: Siskiyou/Del Norte, Modoc, Humboldt, Trinity, Shasta, Lassen, Tehama, Mendocino, Glenn/Lake/Colusa/Sutter (Colusa), Butte/Plumas/Sierra (Plumas), Yuba/Nevada/Placer/El Dorado (El Dorado), Napa/Sonoma/Marin, Yolo/Solano, Sacramento, San Francisco, Contra Costa, San Joaquin, Amador/Calaveras/Tuolumne (Calaveras), Mono/Alpine, San Mateo, Alameda, Santa Clara, Stanislaus/Merced/San Benito (Merced), Mariposa/Madera, Santa Cruz/Monterey (Monterey), Fresno, Kings/Tulare, Inyo, San Luis Obispo, Kern, Santa Barbara, Ventura, Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Orange (Greater Wyoming), Riverside, San Diego, Imperial
having either greater acreage than Delaware
or greater population than Alaska
(who’s laughing now, Wyoming?)
The coastline for Orange County was accidentally omitted from this map, so we ran with it. We decided to rename it Greater Wyoming (on account of its population and political bent) and to allow the Pacific Ocean to reclaim it.
Contrary to conspiracy theorists, neighboring areas did not engineer the Pacific Ocean’s reclamation of Greater Wyoming. Angelenos and Inland Empire-dwellers do, however, enjoy all the advantages of their expanded coastline.
Santa Cruz didn’t make either cut, so had to be combined with Monterey. Monterey bears a long, proud history, and we felt that Santa Cruz should yield the county name honor to the first capitol of California.
The obvious problems with this map are the Great States of Modoc (population 8,777) and Trinity (population 12,355). Even the sparsely populated state of Wyoming has 578,759 souls. We just didn’t think it was fair to give the people of Modoc two Senators.
The county of San Francisco is definitely populous enough to be a state, but it’s only 47 square miles in area. We felt that it needed to absorb Marin (and possibly San Mateo) in order to justify statehood.
Making it Fairer
Time to crack out the spreadsheets and get calculating. Counties were combined until they surpassed the population of Wyoming. We ended up with 24 states (plus Greater Wyoming AKA Orange County which, as part of the Pacific Ocean, arguably doesn’t count).
We drew a second map that tried to be fairer (and also renamed a lot of the combined states).
California del Norte has become a monster, and Fresno really knows how to kick Alta California’s booty.
Imperial County was annoying, being a low-population county whose only neighbors are quite populous. We shackled it to Riverside County, yielding the delicious state name of Imperial Riverside.
Other noteworthy combinations include Estado Santo (San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara), and the unholy conglomeration of counties that formed Alta California (Tuolumne, Mariposa, Madera, Merced, San Benito, Alpine and Mono).
We found Napa-Sonoma and Yolo-Solano too euphonious to shorten.
San Bernardino, as the originator of the whole Many States idea, was awarded the name New California. Once we’d gone there, we decided to rename new states comprised of many counties (and those whose names are too boring to become state names) as sub-Californias.
San Diego was given the appellation SoCal because we thought they’d enjoy the upgrade.
We like this map much better, but we wanted all of California’s new states to be bigger than Alaska.
Upshot
Back to the spreadsheets to make a 20-state (plus Greater Wyoming) map!
East California now includes the eastern side of the Sierra Nevadas. Estado Santo was split up, with San Luis Obispo joining Monterey and San Benito to form West California. Santa Barbara joined the Great State of Ventura. In the reshuffling, the former West California was renamed South California, though San Diego retains SoCal. Yolo-Solano sadly was split up between Napa-Sonoma and Sierra Nevada. The restructured Alta California (again sadly) was renamed Central California, and is still being kicked in the (larger) booty by Fresno.
Greater Wyoming remains in the ocean.
The populations of the new states are as follows:
| New State | Population |
| California del Norte | 869,708 |
| Sierra Nevada | 977,097 |
| Napa-Sonoma | 1,085,969 |
| East California | 841,243 |
| Central California | 1,139,247 |
| West California | 1,055,396 |
| Santa Clara | 1,937,570 |
| Alameda | 1,666,753 |
| Sacramento | 1,540,975 |
| Contra Costa | 1,150,215 |
| Fresno | 994,400 |
| San Francisco | 1,142,971 |
| Ventura | 1,297,494 |
| San Mateo | 769,545 |
| San Joaquin | 752,660 |
| South California | 896,764 |
| Imperial Riverside | 2,632,585 |
| Los Angeles | 10,105,518 |
| SoCal | 3,343,364 |
| New California | 2,171,603 |
| Greater Wyoming | 3,185,968 |
There are still problems with this map, of course. The Great State of LA (that would be Los Angeles) has over 10 million people, which makes it the 9th largest state, right ahead of Michigan. We’d need to divide the City of Angels further to give it equitable representation. The Great State of San Francisco is tinier even than Rhode Island.
We limited our divisions to current county lines. Imperial Riverside, New California, SoCal, Santa Clara, and Greater Wyoming arguably would benefit from further subdivision.
The most significant effect of dividing California is that each newly-formed state would be entitled to two Senators. Further, since the number of electors a state sends to the Electoral College is equal to the total number of Senators and Representatives that state has, this would mean that California as a whole would have more electoral votes, and that those votes would likely not all go to the same candidate.
A common argument for the Senate and Electoral College is that rural populations’ needs and interests might be overlooked or overruled in favor of the more numerous city-dwellers. However, the residents of mostly-rural California del Norte would almost certainly be better served if they didn’t have to share their Senate representation and electoral votes with San Franciscans or Angelenos. With a state as diverse and geographically large as California, the protection of Wyomingites’ interests hurts many Alaskas worth of rural residents.
This exercise greatly improved our knowledge and understanding of Californian geography and demographics. We’re glad to more deeply appreciate the breadth and scope of our state.