The writer is a contributing columnist, based in Chicago
In some parts of my home state of Illinois, November’s election was about more than who runs the country. It was a resounding vote of no confidence in the state of democracy in rural America — at least as it operates in the Democrat-dominated state. Seven mostly Republican counties here voted last November to consider splitting off from their state, bringing to 33 the number that have voted to investigate leaving Illinois — almost a third of the total.
In California, secession campaigners recently got permission to gather signatures, hoping to ask voters in 2028 whether their state should leave the US altogether. According to a YouGov poll last year, 23 per cent of Americans said they would support their state seceding from the US, with the most pro-secession states a mix of Democratic ones such as California and New York, and Republican states like Texas.
Illinois’ separatist campaigners are not planning to leave the union: November’s ballot question, championed by Loret Newlin of Illinois Separation Referendum, asked whether county boards should investigate separating from Democrat-controlled Cook county, which includes Chicago and its suburbs, to form a new US state. GH Merritt, chair of New Illinois State, another separatist group, tells me that between the two groups, 68 of Illinois’ 102 counties have an “active split movement”. Indiana Republican legislators recently passed a bill aimed at creating a commission to study taking on Illinois counties that want to leave.
“The most frequent reason people give for why they want a separate state is ‘our votes don’t count’ and ‘it always goes the way Chicago wants and never the way we want’,” Newlin tells me.” Merritt says downstate residents aren’t being represented: urban and suburban Cook County has almost 40 per cent of the state’s population, and since its politicians dominate state government, they end up making decisions for the remaining, mostly rural, 60 per cent.
“Let’s be real, this is not going to happen,” John Shaw, director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University tells me, noting that there are legal and political obstacles. And the 96 downstate counties in Illinois “get more from the state government than they are paying in”, he says. If they made up a separate state they would be among the poorest in the nation. “These are basically votes of no confidence in the status quo,” he says.
For eight years, John Shure was board chair of Iroquois county, which voted 72.83 per cent in favour of investigating separation. Less than two hours south of Chicago, Iroquois county is so close that it shares a US congressional district with the southern suburbs of the city — but it’s a world away in terms of culture, lifestyle and economics, he told me last week.
We huddle inside his van to escape the spring storm that has flooded fields in the farming community of Watseka. “Chicago politicians . . . dictate everything for the state . . . and that leaves us out,” he says. For example, the state requires the county to hire a “superintendent of weeds”, he says — but won’t pay for it.
Julie Caise, who is minding her two-year-old grandnephew as we chat, says her family has farmed in Iroquois county for more than 150 years. She doesn’t want Democratic Chicago-area politicians deciding rural gun laws — nor does she want her family to lose their land “because we’re paying so much in taxes to support the laws that Chicago wants to pass”.
Mitchell Bence, county Republican party chair, tells me he opposed putting the measure on the ballot because “where are we going to get the funds to maintain our highways, our infrastructure and things like that, if we split from them?” But now he thinks he was wrong: “people should have a voice”.
I’m all for my fellow voters blowing off steam at the ballot box. But I can’t think of anything worse than a country where states are so completely segregated by politics that none of us ever risks running into someone with whom we disagree. Our political echo chambers are impenetrable enough in these days of adore-or-abhor President Donald Trump. Secession would make things so much worse.