Category: Wildfires

Plentiful Popplies. By Kevin (slworking2 on Flickr). CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Poll: Californians ready to govern themselves, stop just short of secession

ICI June 29, 2025

50% of Californians say they trust Sacramento more than Washington—only 23% say the reverse.

71% say California would be better off with special autonomous status within the U.S.

44% of Californians would vote for a ballot measure for peaceful, legal secession—but 54% would vote against.

72% of Californians want California police to arrest federal immigration officers that exceed their authority or act maliciously.

80% of Californians want to control borders with other states “like a country.”

Californians endorse more than a dozen changes to state policy that would make California more autonomous.

ca-population-taxes-spending

What it Means to be a Donor State

C.C. Marin March 14, 2025

Is it accurate to describe the federal funding California gets as California’s own money? Would the U.S. be poorer and weaker without California? Does California’s economy prop up red states? Is California one of the states least reliant on the federal government?

The short answer to all these questions is yes. But it’s pretty hard to win a debate with just one data point.

LA Fire Dept fights Palisades Fire

Connecting California: Did the L.A. Fires Start in D.C?

ICI January 30, 2025

Joe Mathews: The flames that leveled Pacific Palisades and Malibu are believed to have started in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, managed by the National Park Service. (That’s you!).

The blaze that turned Altadena to ash burned through the Angeles National Forest, managed by the U.S. Forest Service, which is part of the United States (you again!) Department of Agriculture.

extorting-with-disaster

The Bulwark: Extorting With Disaster: Why Stop At California?

ICI January 30, 2025

Jill Lawrence: California is an easy target, but it’s far more than that. It would be comparable to Canada if it were its own country, and that is not as far-fetched as it seems. A poll released January 19, as Trump was about to take office, showed 61 percent of Californians favor a peaceful “Calexit” and 77 percent said California should control its state borders “more like a country.” A few days later, as Trump was about to visit, the California secretary of state cleared a petition drive to get a secession proposal onto the 2028 ballot.

Trump wants to be the president who annexed Greenland and Canada, not the one who lost California. If there’s a lesson here, it may be make love, not war, and stop referring to the governor as “Gavin Newscum.” Trump has a country. The question is whether he can keep it.

Photo credit: Ken Lund via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0

Democracy Local: How to Achieve Local Autonomy

ICI November 2, 2024

Fully 68% of Californians believe that California would be better off if California negotiated a special autonomous status within the U.S., according to a poll that my think tank, the Independent California Institute, commissioned from YouGov earlier this year…. Why might Californians want more independence from the federal government?