Over the past five years, 33 counties in Illinois have voted to secede from the state, presumably to either form a new state or join another state. In most of these counties, the voters were given the option to vote yes or no on a ballot question that looked generally like this:

“Shall the board of (the county) correspond with the boards of other counties of Illinois, outside of Cook County, about the possibility of separating from Cook County to form a new state and to seek admission to the Union as such, subject to the approval of the people?”

Many of the voters and policymakers supporting the separation note that they consider themselves to be economically, culturally, and historically separated from Chicago and the counties surrounding it. Most of the state’s 13 million residents—more than nine million people—live within the greater Chicago metro area, but that potentially leaves one or two million people—a “state” the size of Montana or Nebraska—who are interested in breaking free of Chicago metro politics. …

It’s important to remember that these states’ secession movements have no effect on geopolitical realities, or on federal revenue. In the cases where no new state would be formed, not even the US Senate would change. Yet, opposition to these minor changes to the status quo endure because politicians regard any such change as a threat to their power and their ability to impose their power as a means of rewarding their favorite interest groups.

Admittedly, a redrawing of state lines would produce some changes to the electoral college. In the case of redrawing the Indiana-Illinois border, Illinois might lose an electoral college vote, and Indiana could gain one. This, of course, is bound to fuel opposition, but all this means is that opposition to redrawing state lines is based on parochial partisan concerns, and hardly on any sort of principle.