5 of 11 Counties Vote to Secede: Whither "New Colorado" Now?

On November 5th, Colorado went to the polls.  Among other issues at stake there—all of which featured the dynamic of rural Tea Party pushback against an urbanizing, increasingly Democratic-dominated state—11 counties in the northeast and north were asked whether they wanted to secede to form a new, and solidly Republican, State of North Colorado.

Orange counties voted yes to secession; blue ones voted no.

Of the 11, five contiguous counties said yes, while the other six voted to stay in Colorado.

The five splittist counties are Cheyenne (where 62.2% voted yes), Kit Carson (54.2%), Phillips (62.2%), Washington (58.1%), and Yuma (59.6%).  They form a contiguous territory snug against the Kansas border but do not reach into the far northeastern corner of the state, where Sedgwick County voted by 57% to stay under Denver’s thumb.  Weld County, where the rebellion began earlier this year—home to the region’s largest city, Greeley, the presumed future capital—rejected secession by a margin of 56.3% to 43.6%.  The other counties that elected to stay are Elbert, Lincoln, Logan, and—the outlier, in the state’s northwest corner—Moffat County.

From this summer, this news graphic showed green states planning to vote on secession
and blue states expressing interest.

But does this mean that silkscreeners are now poised to churn out 51-star flags?  Not at all.  Any new admission to the Union must be approved by both houses of Congress.  The last state to secede from another was West Virginia, in 1863, and it was really seceding from the Confederacy back into the United States.  And the last time new stars were added, in 1959, Hawaii and Alaska were admitted more or less in tandem, so as to preserve the balance of power between the two national political parties.  A new state, after all, means two new senators, and the redrawing of congressional districts as well.  This two-at-a-time pattern is an old tradition, dating back to events such as the Missouri Compromise (Maine and Missouri, in 1820), and even to the simultaneous admission of Kentucky and Vermont in 1791—in those days the idea being to preserve the balance between slave and free states.  A new Democratic state would need to be added to balance a North Colorado in today’s divided, fiercely partisan political climate.  And no one in Congress seems remotely interested.

A proposed flag (not proposed by proponents, it need hardly be added)

The North Colorado movement began in early summer of this year (as reported at the time in this blog), with initially eight counties—Kit Carson, Logan, Morgan, Phillips, Sedgwick, Washington, and Yuma—though, by early July, Cheyenne and Lincoln had joined as well, soon followed by Elbert County.  The whole phenomenon has been a response to this politically mixed state—famous for category-defying maverick politicians like Governor Richard “Dickie” Lamm and Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell—turning “blue” in recent years, led by the growth of the capital, Denver, and to a lesser extent the counterculture mecca Boulder.  Barack Obama was the first Democratic presidential candidate to draw a majority of Colorado voters since 1964.  It was a swing state for several election cycles, until Obama won it handily in 2008, and it is now considered a blue state.  New legislation decriminalizing marijuana and restricting gun rights and animal cruelty further incensed socially conservative voters in the rural plains east and northeast of Denver, a region sometimes known as the Northern Front Range.  This week’s election also featured a heated recall campaign growing out of resistance to gun control and other issues.  The growing Hispanicization of Colorado has also been a factor, and the North Colorado rebellion, like the broader Tea Party movement of which it is a part, can reasonably be seen as connected to demographic shifts that promise to make white Americans become this century a racial minority, in a country with no racial majority at all.  North Colorado would be by far the whitest state in the Union.  There aren’t even that many American Indians there.

These two fellers represent the demographics of the North Colorado secession movement.

But interest came too from more than a dozen other Colorado counties, covering more than half the state’s land area, and even a couple counties in neighboring Kansas to the east and Nebraska to the northeast.  Interest was expressed in southeastern Wyoming as well (all reported at the time in this blog).  In fact, the North Colorado movement is only the most serious of numerous suggestions made over the years to create some kind of new state in the eastern Colorado area where the state meets up with rural parts of Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma.  West Kansas, Kansorado, Kansahoma, and even CoKaNe (i.e., parts of Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska)—yes, pronounced like cocaine—are all names that have been tossed around.

A more seriously proposed North Colorado flag

The name New Colorado has also been proposed for this year’s 51-state movement, and perhaps that name is destined to replace North Colorado, since the configuration of secessionist-voting counties now appears less northeasterly oriented and more easterly oriented than originally conceived.  Nor is the movement likely to go away.  Despite the six counties that voted no, those defeats were surprisingly narrow, and this has definitely been the most well-organized and high-profile state secession movement since 1975, when Michigan’s legislature came one vote shy of approving a proposal to hive off the state’s rural, conservative Upper Peninsula as the State of Superior (or Superiorland, or Ontonagan) (which some want to include northern Wisconsin as well).  North Colorado separatism inspired conservative regions in blue or blue-trending states like California and Oregon (the State of Jefferson), Maryland (Western Maryland), and New York (West New York) to contemplate secession too.  And Tuesday’s electoral showing is likely to get heartlanders thinking harder about partition in places where it has already been suggested in the past, such as “South California,” Florida, Virginia, Illinois, Washington, Nevada, and elsewhere.

As a movement, it is not going away.  In Colorado, rural conservative forces had already, even before this week’s vote, been thinking of other ways to increase their political participation, such as turning the Colorado legislature’s upper chamber into one where counties had equal representation irrespective of population.  This would in effect make Colorado into a federation of counties—something that to my knowledge has never been implemented at the state level, where upper and lower chambers differ in their structure mainly in the size of representative districts (but if any readers know of other historical examples of such proposals I would be grateful).

Birthplace of the North Colorado rebellion

And last month in northern California, where the decades-old but suddenly jump-started State of Jefferson movement has been re-energized (as reported on regularly in this blog), there is a new proposal to sidestep the requirement for federal congressional approval of new states by creating a sort of Jefferson “autonomous region” free of state laws and taxes and with its own courts, police, and social services (or, rather, lack of social services, since that seems to be what Jeffersonians prefer).  You know, that sounds like nothing so much as an Indian reservation.  Maybe, in the increasingly brown United States, white people’s reservations are the future.  North Colorado, be careful what you wish for.

Would North Colorado be better off as an autonomous Caucasian Reservation?

[Also, for those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it some time in 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

51st-State Fever! 9—Make That 11—Colorado Counties Put Split on Ballot, Maryland Panhandle Throws Hat in Ring

The eight core secessionist counties in Colorado in red, and two that are thinking about it in yellow

Last year, in the wake of Barack Obama’s reelection, politically conservative Americans were showing their outrage by flooding the White House’s “We the People” petition web-page with demands for each of the 50 states to secede from the United States (as reported at the time in this blog (and in a follow-up)).  (There was a racial component to this: the vast majority of secession demands came from the Old Confederacy.)  This year’s Tea Party symbolic-protest theme is 51st-state movements.  In addition to the existing pushes for statehood for an Orange County–based South California and a Chicago-less and largely-white Rest-of-Illinois, and in addition to a Democratic statehood push in District of Columbia and a mostly-nonpartisan one in Puerto Rico, 2013 has seen: a revival of the State of Jefferson idea in far-northern California and, most notably, a high-profile push for a State of Northern Colorado.  Now, the sparsely-populated western, Appalachian counties of Maryland want statehood too.

State of Jefferson supporters in northern California

But, wait—is it really just symbolic politics?  In Colorado at least, maybe not: the question of getting out from under the yoke of the liberal oppressors in Denver and Boulder is now going to be on the ballot in nine counties [actually, 11; see below] this November.

Nice logo—too bad nearly all the actual grizzlies in the area referred to have been killed.

In northeastern Colorado, the question of whether to form a State of North Colorado (or Northern Colorado, or New Colorado) will be put to voters in Cheyenne, Kit Carson, Logan, Phillips, Sedgwick, Washington, Weld, and Yuma counties, forming the rectangular state’s northeastern corner.  The slightly discontiguous Elbert County slipped in under the deadline, and it will be on the ballot there too.  (Morgan County decided to keep the question off the ballot, while Lincoln and Cheyenne counties also decided to sit this one out, after toying with the idea.  [Since this article was written, Lincoln County has reversed course and joined the other nine counties, and Moffatt County, in the northwest of the state, has joined as well.])  There has even been interest in a merger coming out of adjoining rural disaffected areas in Wyoming, Nebraska, and Kansas.

The insurgency started in Weld County, which includes the University of Northern Colorado, in Greeley, but also includes rural voters fed up with environmental regulation, gun control, and now legal marijuana in an increasingly urban and liberal state that used to be a swing state.  The eight core secessionist states had been getting support from other rural counties, not all of them in the northeast, but on August 27th commissioners of the separatist counties met with their counterparts in Las Animas and Herfano counties, in the south of the state, along the border with New Mexico.

One proposal for a North Colorado flag

Mack Louden, commissioner of Las Animas County, told media, “There’s a lot of frustration in rural Colorado—east to west, north to south—about how we’re being treated. We own 90% of the land mass, but we represent a very small part of the population.  All the votes are in Denver.  They’ve figured that out and don’t worry too much about rural Colorado.”

Tom Gilley, president of the Weld County–based organization 51st State Initiative, said that commissioners in Las Animas and Herfano might bring the question to voters too.  It wouldn’t be in time for the November 5th ballot, but it raises longer-term questions of just how, geographically, “New Colorado” (as they would now have to finally settle on calling it) would look.

As you might imagine, the parking lots at Boulder’s University of Colorado
have very few pick-up trucks with gun racks and fetus bumper stickers.

Louden added, “Right now, [secession] looks very appealing on the surface.  But once you start picking that scab down, you can get into some flesh that you don’t want to see.”  Perhaps one of the things he means is that any new admissions to the Union need to be cleared not only by the state legislature in Denver but by Capitol Hill in Washington.  And, with both houses of Congress being as evenly divided as they are, any new “red state” (i.e., one with two new Republican senators) would need to be balanced out by a blue (Democratic) one.  This is an old tradition in American expansion.  The Missouri Compromise of 1820 allowed Maine, a free state, and Missouri, a slave one, to balance each other out, while Republican Alaska and Democratic Hawaii had to be let in pretty much in tandem in 1959.  And even if someone could craft, say, a D.C.-statehood bill to balance a “New Colorado” one, that still doesn’t mean that doesn’t mean it would be a sure thing.

... and now Maryland

A possible proposal for a State of Western Maryland.
The current movement also includes Carroll County,
even though parts of it are almost suburban Baltimore.

Such considerations may not be dampening enthusiasm in western Maryland’s mountainous conservative far-west, where the idea of statehood has recently caught on as well.  Some residents in the Appalachian “panhandle” along the Pennsylvania border, are interested in seceding from the rest of the very-blue State of Maryland.  Scott Strzelczyk, who lives in New Windsor, in Maryland’s Carroll County, has founded an organization called Western Maryland: A New State Initiative.  Strzelczyk is host of a local AM radio show with a dissident, “constitutionalist” bent called The Forgotten Men.  He envisions Western Maryland to consist of Garrett, Allegany, Washington, Frederick, and Carroll counties—all of them Republican counties with tiny populations forming a geographically eccentric protrusion westward from a coastal stated that has two Democratic senators in Washington, includes heavily African-American Baltimore and the liberal northern suburbs of D.C., and voted for Obama by almost 62% in both 2008 and 2012.

Maryland’s counties, shown in shades of red or blue
based on their respective vote shares for Mitt Romney or Barack Obama, respectively, in 2012

Though far less organized and far less popular than the North Colorado movement, the idea of partitioning Maryland is not new.  Its sprawling eastern leg is just as geographically anomalous as its western one, and just as divorced from the concerns of the bulk of the population in Baltimore, Annapolis, and the D.C. suburbs.  This Eastern Shore region, along Chesapeake Bay, with its more Southern-style plantation culture and economy, used to be Maryland’s demographic and political anchor, until the rise of Baltimore in the 19th century.  In 1998, the nine easternmost counties proposed seceding as a new state to be called either Chesapeake, Eastshore, or—getting poetic now—Atlantis or Arcadia.  Others have wanted those nine counties to join Delaware, along with Virginia’s disconnected Accomack and Northampton counties, to form a State of Delmarva, though that makes no political sense: why would the Democrats who run Delaware with little opposition want to dilute their power in a more purplish state?

One vision of a partition of Maryland (and D.C.),
from a recent article in Michael Trinklein’s excellent and highly recommended Lost States blog

Names from the 1998 Eastern Shore movement like Chesapeake and Arcadia point up a singular failing of some of today’s 51st-state movements: unimaginative names.  The idea of Western Maryland would be much more likely to stir passions if it were called something like Allegania or Cumberland, while northeastern Colorado, though it has few remotely colorful county or town names, would benefit from being renamed something along the lines of Northern Front Range, which is what locals call the region.  The Platte River runs through the area, so maybe that could be used to form a name.  Anything but New Colorado or North Colorado, though—if only because North Carolina has already squatted on the postal abbreviation NC.

It seems unlikely Western Maryland would come up with a flag more impressive
than Maryland’s current one, based on the coat-of-arms of Lord Baltimore.

[Also, for those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it some time in 2013.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

“North Colorado” Wants to Add 51st Star to the American Flag

It started as a pipe dream among many others, where residents of one area of a U.S. state contemplate seceding, so that they can be free of a political majority they find distasteful.  Examples that have been reported on in this blog are the Republican-led South California movement in southern California’s high deserts, the similarly politically conservative State of Superior movement in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and a proposal by Republican downstaters in Illinois to eject Chicago and thus make the rest of Land of Lincoln a red state.  But the recent plan by disgruntled rural conservatives in northeastern Colorado to split off and form the State of North Colorado turns out to be a more durable idea than had at first been thought.  On July 8th, 10 Colorado counties, forming the state’s northeastern corner, met in Akron, Colorado, to lay out a plan of action.

[Note: For North Colorado and 51st-state updates since this article was published, see this recent article.)

The movement, which began in the minds of the county commissioners in Weld County, builds on rural anger of legislative moves in the capital, Denver, that make many northeasterners feel “our way of life is under attack.”  Such developments include new laws on cruelty to livestock (Republicans appear to be for it), renewable energy (they’re against that), gun control (“cold, dead fingers” and all that), and, most nationally prominent, Colorado last year becoming one of now two states (Washington is the other) where marijuana is no longer illegal.

Colorado used to be pretty much a red state.  Yes, it is known for producing individualistic and eccentric political views that don’t always map well onto what the East Coast regards as the left–right political spectrum.  The best example of this is Richard “Dick” Lamm, governor from 1975 to 1987, an ardent environmentalist Democrat who killed a plan to hold the 1976 Winter Olympics in Denver but who also regarded his own Democratic Party as “too close to the trial lawyers and the National Education Association” and supported physician-assisted suicide, long before any other public figure did, not on the grounds of compassion but because invalids had “a duty to die and get out of the way.”  (Later, he joined Ross Perot’s fiscal-conservative Reform Party.)  But rural Coloradans’ individualism, suspicion of government, and romanticism of the Wild West always overrode their other impulses and made Colorado a Republican Party stronghold.  At least until demographics began to shift over the past couple decades: Denver and the emerging hippie counterculture mecca of Boulder have grown, and so has the state’s Hispanic population.  It is now a swing state, and that explains why those in the state’s rural northeast feel (correctly, actually) that they are losing their voice.

Richard Lamm

Initially, North Colorado was to consist of eight counties: Kit Carson, Logan, Morgan, Phillips, Sedgwick, Washington, and Yuma.  By the time of the July 8th meeting, Lincoln and Cheyenne had come on board, creating a set of boundaries that would embrace about a fifth of the state’s land area (and essentially none of its famous mountains) but only just over 6% of its population.  Signatures are now being gathered in all 10 counties, plus Elbert County, which, unlike any of the others, is treated by the U.S. Census as part of the greater Denver area.  There have also now been expressions of interest from a much less geographically homogeneous array of rural counties around the state, 19 of them: Delta, Garfield, Mesa, Moffat, Montrose, Rio Blanco, and Routt in the northwestern corner; Larimer in the north; and Baca, Bent, Crowley, Douglas, El Paso, Fremont, Kiowa, Otero, Park, Pueblo, and Teller in the southeast.  This makes nearly half of the state’s 64 counties and over half its land area.

In addition to the original 8 “North Colorado” counties (see map at top of article), all the counties in green on this map are now on board with secession, and 19 other Colorado counties (in blue) and two Kansas ones (in white) have expressed support.  In dark green is Cheyenne County, where the issue will go on the ballot.

There is also support from two counties in western Kansas who would like to join (Cheyenne and Wallace) as well as parts of western Nebraska.  These ideas are not new.  Shortly after marijuana was decriminalized, a conservative Coloradoan newspaper columnist suggested a conglomerate of rural counties at the intersection of eastern Colorado, western Kansas, and southwestern Nebraska’s “panhandle” become a new state to be called CoKaNe (yes, pronounced like that—and that does line up pretty well with the drugs of choice of the two parties’ candidates in the 2000 presidential election).  And in 1982, 85% of residents in Nebraska’s 11 “panhandle” counties told a newspaper they wanted to get out from under Lincoln’s thumb and join Wyoming (an idea, actually, which dates to the 1890s).  A columnist in Alliance, Nebraska, said, to this suggestion, “Then we’d have mountains and they’d have a football team.”  States of West Kansas, Kansahoma, and Kansorado have also been mulled in the past.  But none of this had ever been as serious as the North Colorado movement.  Officials in Cheyenne County, Colorado, are already planning to put the issue before voters in a referendum, and Phillips County is considering it.

After the initial hubbub, some moderates began saying that perhaps a less, um, democratic federalism might be in order, such as guaranteeing individual counties a certain share of legislative seats, as a way of slowing the demographic juggernaut of Denver and Boulder city-slickers in Coloradan elections.  But presuming that the North Colorado idea goes forward, some things will have to be sorted out first.

Welcome to downtown Boulder

One is the United States Congress, which has to approve any new states.  Generally, Congress is only willing to admit states in pairs, for political reasons.  This dates back to the Missouri Compromise of 1820, when the admission of Maine and Missouri retained the delicate balance of slave and free states and was most recently in play in 1959, when conservative Alaska and liberal Hawaii were added to the union in tandem.  If the North Colorado push does not go away, it may be time for the District of Columbia or Puerto Rico to seize the moment.

Second is a postal abbreviation.  North Carolina is already NC, and ND and CO are likewise taken.  This is as good a reason as any for North Coloradoans to actually come up with a new name for the state and not take the lazy West Virginia route.

Third, of course, is a flag.  Both opponents and proponents of North Colorado statehood have offered designs, though the movement itself does not have one yet.  The Southern Nationalist Network, a (rather embarrassingly for North Coloradoans) racist neo-Confederate organization, has suggested this one (the uncommented-upon use of a red star showing just how far in the past the Cold War is for many young conservatives) ...

... while a more Democratically inclined blogger suggests either this ...

... or an expression of rural Colorado values that looks like this:

[Also, for those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it in spring 2013.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]