Several stories have been published about California's Proposition 50, which would permit re-districting immediately, between the decennial censuses. It's a topic I first blogged about here, in late August.
The first is Jeanne Kuang's deeply reported story for CalMatters, from mid-September.
The headline is a telling, "These rural Californians want to secede. Newsom’s maps would pair them with Bay Area liberals." Here's the lede:
Over several rivers and through even more woods, flags advocating secession from California flutter above hills dotted with cattle, which outnumber people at least sixfold.
This ranching region with a libertarian streak might have more in common with Texas than the San Francisco Bay Area.
But it’s not Texas. Five hours northeast of Sacramento on an easy day, Modoc County and its roughly 8,500 residents are still — begrudgingly — in California.
And California is dominated by Democrats, who are embroiled in a tit-for-tat redistricting war with the Lone Star State that will likely force conservative Modoc County residents to share a representative in Congress with parts of the Bay Area.
Modoc County and two neighboring red counties would be shifted into a redrawn district that stretches 200 miles west to the Pacific Coast and then south, through redwoods and weed farms, to include some of the state’s wealthiest communities, current Democratic Rep. Jared Huffman’s home in San Rafael and the northern end of the Golden Gate Bridge, all in uber-liberal Marin County.
“It’s like a smack in the face,” said local rancher Amie Martinez. “How could you put Marin County with Modoc County? It’s just a different perspective.”
* * *
Though Modoc County supervisors have declared their opposition to Prop. 50, there’s little else locals can do. Registered Republicans are outnumbered by Democrats statewide nearly two-to-one. Rural residents represent an even smaller share of the state’s electorate.
“It’ll be very hard to fight back,” said Tim Babcock, owner of a general store in Lassen County, a similar and neighboring community that’s proposed to be drawn into a different liberal-leaning congressional district. “Unless we split the state. And that’s never going to happen.”
Here are some key quotes highlighting the rural implications of the proposed redistricting.
County Supervisor Geri Byrne said she knew it was a longshot — but thought, “when’s the last time The New York Times called someone in Modoc County?”
Byrne, who is also chair of the Rural County Representatives of California and of the upcoming National Sheepdog Finals, said the secession resolution was about sending a message.
“It wasn’t conservative-liberal,” [Byrne] said. “It was the urban-rural divide, and that’s what this whole Prop. 50 is about.”
Even a Democratic resident running a produce pickup center in Alturas observed that her neighbors are “not that Trumpy.” Instead, there’s a pervasive general distrust of politics on any side of the aisle.
* * *
Flourishing wolves are a problem
At the moment, all anyone can talk about is the wolves.
The apex predator returned to California more than a decade ago, a celebrated conservation success story after they were hunted to near-extinction in the western U.S. Now they’re flourishing in the North State — and feeding on cattle, throwing ranching communities on edge. Federally, they’re still listed as an endangered species under the landmark conservation law signed by President Richard Nixon.
Under California rules, ranchers can only use nonlethal methods to deter the wolves, like electrifying fencing or hiring ranch hands to guard their herds at night.
* * *
Few Republicans in the state and nation understand “public lands districts,” said Modoc County Supervisor Shane Starr, a Republican who used to work in LaMalfa’s office. “Doug’s the closest thing we’ve got.”
“This whole thing with DEI and ‘woke culture’ and stuff,” he said, referring to the diversity and inclusion efforts under attack from the right, “it’s like, yeah, we had a kid who goes to the high school who dyed his hair a certain color. Cool, we don’t care. All of these things going on at the national stage are not based in our reality whatsoever.”
At a cattlemen’s dinner in Alturas one recent evening, Martinez said she once ran into LaMalfa at a local barbecue fundraiser for firefighters and approached him about a proposal to designate parts of northwestern Nevada as protected federal wilderness. Her 700-person town of Cedarville in east Modoc County is 10 minutes from the state line.
Martinez worried about rules that prohibit driving motorized vehicles in wilderness, which she said would discourage the hunters who pass through during deer season and book lodging in town. Even though the proposal was in Nevada, LaMalfa sent staff, including Starr, to meetings to raise objections on behalf of the small town, she said.
“I know we won’t get that kind of representation from Marin County,” she said.
Reached by phone, Huffman defended his qualifications to represent the region.
Adding Siskiyou, Shasta and Modoc counties would mean many more hours of travel to meet constituents, but Huffman pointed out his district is already huge, covering 350 miles of the North Coast. And it includes many conservative-leaning, forested areas in Trinity and Del Norte counties. A former attorney for the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council, he’s the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, where [first district congresswoman Doug] LaMalfa also sits.
Then there is this more recent story by Bloomberg's Maxwell Adler, which features the following lede:
California’s Marin and Modoc counties lie more than 200 miles apart — and several worlds away.
Modoc, tucked into the state’s remote northeast corner, lacks a single traffic light. Many of its 8,500 residents once lost internet service after squirrels chewed through a fiber-optic cable. Ranchers fear wolf attacks on cattle.
Tech-industry wealth, meanwhile, has transformed Marin from a bohemian refuge outside San Francisco into one of California’s richest communities. Traffic regularly jams the freeway into the city, and residents fight over efforts to build more homes.
On the same day, the New York Times published this story about Kevin Kiley, a Republican congressman from greater Sacramento who represents a very rural district stretching down the eastern Sierra. He would almost certainly lose his seat if redistricting occurs.
Here's coverage from the California Farm Bureau, "In Rural Districts, Backlash Mounts Against Prop. 50."
In contrast to these rural-focused stories, Politico published this September 7, 2025 piece covering the California GOP meeting. It does not even acknowledge the concern regarding lack of representation of rural concerns. It includes no use of the word "rural."
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