Would you like to see your state/province divided?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m coming from a USA point of view, but will welcome input from anywhere else in the world.

Some background:

In the 1800’s, the USA added a new state every three years on average. Most of these were carved out of territories conquered from the indigenous peoples and later Mexico, and were incorporated when the presence of the dominant culture was still very minimal and the territory mostly unsettled. But three (West Virginia, Maine, and Vermont) were actually detached from the claims of previously existing states.

Once we filled in the continental territory of the USA, and gave up on conquering Canada and Mexico (mostly), we stopped.

At the present writing, however, the states west of the Appalachians have added population and developed into rather more established settlements, and the legacy of old divisions leaves us some oddities.

Well, one big oddity:
On the East Coast, a state can be a small area that was a tiny Crown Colony in British times, like Rhode Island, Delaware, or New Hampshire.
West of the Appalachians, states are all larger in area, and except for Alaska and the high, arid, and mostly uninhabited states of the Rockies (and here I really mean Nevada and Wyoming), can encompass a great number of people and several substantial metropolitan areas.
And then there are Texas and California, which are each freakin’ huge.

Locally, we get used to the way our state is put together, and accept that as normal. So to a Rhode Islander, the state capital is relatively close, and the state a small region with a given ethnic identity. To a Californian, the state capital is way away from almost everybody, and parts of the state are so remote you may never go there. I suggest that states like New York, Ohio, Florida, Michigan, and Missouri are more like California than like Rhode Island in this regard.

And then there’s the federal Senate, where each state gets equal representation, and which gets calls for its abolition because Wyoming and California each get two votes.

Well. Maybe we should go back to carving out new states.

My home state of Missouri is large enough that it could reasonably split into three states and still cede some mostly-empty counties to Iowa. I can see pros and cons.

What about you? Would you consider splitting your state or province up? Or merging it with another for administrative purposes?

2

It would take some convincing for me to believe this is a good idea. Splitting and clumping states together? Now we are getting into the territory of gerrymandering states. What would people get out of it to compensate for the dangers of that? I mean, I can see why people in the UP would want to split off from lower Michigan. It just takes so long to get from Iron Mountain to Lansing. But the UP just wouldn’t be much of a state. The same with the “T” in Pennsylvania.

If there were major administrative advantages I could be convinced.
But if it’s just representation then better to fix Congress, IMO.

3

I think that all else being equal, people being equally represented is better, so states such as Montana and Wyoming shouldn’t be split up into more states since they are already over-represented in Congress.

As for Florida, it shouldn’t be merged, and I wouldn’t mind splitting it up except the question would be where to draw the line. If it had to be split into two, the obvious place to do it is everything above the I-4 corridor (i.e. Tampa-Orlando-Daytona) splits off into its own state, everything else stays. The problem with that is that leaves North Florida, which I don’t live in, with 2 more undoubtedly conservative Senators versus a relatively small population.

Florida has the population to support three smaller states, but there isn’t an obvious split that doesn’t look like gerrymandering. Socially, you could split it into North Florida, “Central” Florida (which would include the I-4 corridor, the Space Coast, and the southern Gulf Coast), and Miami and South Central Florida (albeit with the rural culture of the Okeechobee area being somewhat mismatched to Miami.) Except Central Florida would look so un-stately on a map that it would look gerrymandered.

I also have ties to New York State, and that faces similar problems. It could easily be split into two, but that would risk creating two competitive Senate seats in the Upstate region. Plus, it might radicalize upstate Republicans by giving them more room to move to the right, since right now they don’t have to be insane in order to get elected, they just have to be not-New York City. (Or some of them might become Democrats, but who knows.)

As far as splitting up goes, I wouldn’t mind giving the Adirondacks or some far-eastern territory to Vermont since it has a similar culture. Similarly the Southern Tier being in New York versus Pennsylvania seems arbitrary.

4

Houston Press writer John Nova Lomax divided Texas into musical regions back when Ricky Perry made his secession threat–or “played to the wingnut gallery in an attempt to outflank primary opponent Kay Bailey Hutchison.” We could use those borderlines to create new states within the USA! (Or just have fun looking at The Annals of Texas Music–starting in my own State of Brazoria, with links back to the others.)

If we split, the USA would have ten Texas Senators, rather than merely two. They might not all be Republicans–but they’d still be Texans!

5

Since I started this thread, I may as well talk about my own state and its region.

Missouri might make sense split into a St. Louis region, a Kansas City region, and an Ozarks region. (Though that could leave the City of St. Louis locked in a state with its somewhat hostile suburbs without any support from Kansas City, so might be politically undesirable.)

A hypothetical reorganization of the west bank of the Mississippi might go something like this:[ul][]New Orleans and southern Louisiana finally tell the more anglicized parts of northern Louisiana to shove off; they merge with southern Arkansas.[]This inspires northern Arkansas to break off and join the southern third of Missouri in the new state of Ozarka (roughly from Rolla to Little Rock).[]Much of Western Missouri (including Kansas City) merges into Kansas, thus voiding the “Kansas City K, Kansas City Mo.” distinction, to everyone’s relief.[]A few counties in the north merge into Iowa.[]The new state of Saint Louis gets what’s left, including parts of northern Missouri that prove too Johnny Reb for Iowa or Kansas to want to put up with. It also incorporates a swath of present-day Illinois from East St. Louis to Cairo.[]Future schoolchildren in present-day Mo. don’t actually understand where “Missouri” was. :D[/ul]Unlikely? Maybe. But I suspect many of my fellow Missourians would find it amusing.

6

There’s always a core group of people who want to make the UP its own state. But there’s pretty much no economic base here, so it’d be a pretty miserable state. Personally, I’d much rather see it get attached to Wisconsin, since both culturally and geographically we’re much closer.

7

I’m in California.
There is a north/south “rivalry,” but the political divide is coast/inland. Even those two dichotomies are over-simplified. I rather like how large, influential, and diverse my state is. I’d sooner see us become our own country than split the state. I’m not advocating secession, it’s just that we could easily function economically if we needed to.

8

Washington State might be better off split into two new states. One would contain King and Snohomish counties, and the other would be the remaining 37 counties. King and Snohomish counties contain almost 40% of the population of the state, are uber liberal (particularly in King County), and completely dominate statewide elections. We havent had a Republican governor since the 1980’s, with little chance of changing in the forseable future.

9

To me, states are pretty outdated. Do we really need 50 Kinds of driving licenses? I was driving in NY and there is a 5 mile stretch on one of the highways that passes through New Jersey with a rest stop. Because it is New jersey you can’t pump your own gas. The rest stops ahead and behind are in New York where you can.

Cities like Portland, Seattle, Madison, and Boston have more in common with each other than they do with the rural areas of their states.

10

I’m for northern Ontario setting up its own shop. There is very litte in common between the highly populated urban south and sparsely populated wild north, so often our needs and concerns get lost in the wash. We have mining and logging, so it’s not like we need the south for financial support. That, and it would be nice to take a round trip to the provincial capital without clocking a couple of thousand miles on the odometer.

11

That’s an interesting take, but don’t you think the Bear Flag Republic would be divided into several states?

12

Well, of course, but we already have counties, like everybody else.

13

In my case, no. The economic benefits from elsewhere in the province are good to have; but perhaps more importantly, I wouldn’t want to concentrate more provincial power in the hands of the religious than currently exists. Southern Alberta is Canada’s Bible Belt; and knowing some of the locals, it would not be unreasonable to expect that if they achieved power in a smaller province, we’d see a lot of unpleasant changes.

14

Same for Oregon. But while the eastern areas might think they’d be better off without the urban centers, the reality would probably mean less money for schools and other infrastructure, and an influx of population from those areas to the cities.

15

Maybe you should take the UP, too. I’d be happy to be a Canadian.

16

I grew up in the invisible part of what was itself the invisible part of a state.

When people think of New York, they think of New York City. People forget that there’s an entire state above the Bronx. There’s a lot of people in “upstate” who’d be happy to have NYC go its own way and a lot of people in NYC who’d be happy to do so.

But going beyond that, I grew up in the real upstate - the rural north. As far as we were concerned, Albany was as foreign as Manhattan. Northern New York state is more like the western end of New England.

Realistically, I don’t think northern New York has enough to become a state on its own. But I think New York minus New York City would do okay.

17

The federal constitution forbids forming states from exisiting ones. WV/VA was an exception for the Civil War, etc., since we had 2 governments then.

If it were possible though, Rhode Island should not even be a state, ha! The largest county in Ohio is 700 some square miles, and RI is a little over 1000, not too much difference in size as compared to county/state.

18

I don’t think this is right. The constitution prohibits splitting or joining states without the consent of the states in question, but if you have their consent you’re golden.

19

Yeah, see Article IV, Section 3 – you can do it with the consent of Congress and the consent of the legislatures of the states involved.

20

Yeah, I was thinking this myself. Of course, if Upper and Lower Michigan seem different, I suppose Upper Michigan would be even more so from northern Ontario.

And eastern Washington and Oregon could go in together as Notaxualyidaho. :smiley: