San Bernardino County residents voted for officials to study the possibility of seceding from California as more grow increasingly tired of the state’s far-left policies.
The county approved the advisory ballot proposal, which was voted upon in November, earlier this week, the Associated Press (AP) reported. San Bernardino’s Board of Supervisors’ next step is likely to form a committee that will study if state and federal public funds were fairly distributed with local governments within the county.
Curt Hagman, the chairman of the Board of Supervisors, says there is “a lot of frustration” that San Bernardino residents have toward the left-wing governing policies of Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and the Democrat-controlled state legislature.
Residents in the county, and across the state, pay the highest taxes in the nation while also living under soaring rates of crime, homelessness, and high housing costs.
Many are also irate over the state’s COVID-19 policies, which saw public school students forced into remote learning early in the pandemic, while the state waw one of the last to discontinue the policy. Remote learning caused considerable academic setbacks for K to 12 students within the state, including negatively impacting younger students’ learning skills, Breitbart News reported.
As a result, droves of California residents and businesses have moved to states such as Arizona, Texas, Florida, and Nevada to escape the high taxes and the volatile political climate. From 2020 to 2022, California lost over 352,000 residents, according to the state’s Department of Finance statistics.
While registered Democrat voters outnumber Republican voters by 12 points, Newsom lost San Bernardino County by five points in the November gubernatorial election. Still, the incumbent governor easily went on to win reelection.
The county is the largest by area in California and the contiguous United States, stretching from the urban regions of the City of San Bernardino to the rural areas bordering Arizona and Nevada. Moreover, it is the fifth most populace county in the Golden State, with more than two million residents.
Attempts to secede and become the 51st state in the union are unlikely, as the proposal would require approval from the Democrat state legislature and Congress.
Although Hagman noted that he does not want to secede from California, he says he understands the voters may feel alienated from Sacramento’s policies, telling the AP, “It’s been a rough few years.”
Similar calls for secession from the coastal liberal enclaves of California have been made for years. In 2017, activists filed a lawsuit to create the “State of Jefferson” from 21 counties in the northern part of the state. However, every secession attempt from the state has been unsuccessful.
You can follow Ethan Letkeman on Twitter at @EthanLetkeman.
