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Abstract

When California voters embraced mid-decade congressional redistricting in 2025, the greatest media attention landed on the state’s First Congressional District, CA-01. It is residents of that district who are likely to feel the consequences of the new maps most profoundly. In the form established by the California Citizens Redistricting Commission in 2021, CA-01 occupied more than 26,000 square miles in the state’s northeastern corner. The district included a number of inland counties stretching from Modoc, tucked into the corner formed by the Oregon and Nevada state lines, to Colusa, in the Great Central Valley. The cluster of ten counties—hereinafter “old CA-01” because the district has been reconstituted under the Proposition 50 map, effective with the 2026 midterm election—have a lot in common: distance from state and federal power; economies rooted in agriculture, grazing, and timber; the presence of public lands; vulnerability to wildfire; and dependence on sparse infrastructure stretched across vast territory. In short, their residents were a “community of interest,” a concept used in redistricting law and practice to refer to groups of individuals who are likely to share similar concerns and who thus would benefit from cohesive representation in a legislative body. The Proposition 50 map, which 65% of voters embraced in the November 2025 election, disaggregated old CA-01, a Republican stronghold. It distributed that CA-01 territory among four districts, “each with an arm stretching to the coast or into Sacramento-area cities.” It was no surprise, then, that the new map elicited great protest from CA-01 voters. Residents in this sparsely populated region tend to identify as rural, and they widely embrace the label “north state.” The region is also home to a long-standing movement to secede from California and join with several counties in southern Oregon to form a 51st state, the State of Jefferson. While that movement is quixotic and some would argue fringe, it has been fueled for decades by north state residents’ sense that state government neither understands them nor appreciates their contributions. Indeed, the region has for some time been a poster child for rural resentment, a phenomenon in political psychology that has emerged across the nation in recent decades. In the wake of Proposition 50’s passage, residents of old CA-01—along with Congressman Doug LaMalfa, who represented this region for more than a decade before his sudden and untimely death in early 2026—asserted that their rural concerns will be overlooked by a representative likely to hail from, and be more influenced by, the urban areas to which the new map now tethers them.

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