Louis Marinelli, president of the Yes California Independence Campaign, announced the news in an official farewell statement last week.

“While Washington refused to act and the Americans continued to spew their hatred towards immigrants, Sacramento actively worked to protect our immigrants,” he said. “It was this contrast which motivated me to start this campaign for independence.”

The movement was always seen as a long-shot effort, but it highlighted the way in which many Californians have tried to distance themselves from Washington in the age of Trump.

The measure would have needed to get 585,407 valid signatures by July to qualify for the ballot in 2018.

“I have found in Russia a new happiness, a life without the albatross of frustration and resentment towards ones’ homeland, and a future detached from the partisan divisions and animosity that has thus far engulfed my entire adult life,” Marinelli added.

Furthermore, multiple donors pulled out of the effort due to fears of being tied to Putin, complicating a path forward for the movement.

“People got scared,” Ruiz Evans, vice president of Yes California told the Sacramento Bee. “They got spooked by what they saw on the news and pulled out.”

There were also constitutional hurdles, as a secession would have needed an amendment to the Constitution, meaning there would need to be approval by two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of the state legislatures.

But still, Ruiz says he’s not giving up and plans to file a new “Calexit” proposal by May 1 in association with a new group called the California Freedom Coalition.

More Californians — but slightly fewer Americans — would support the Golden State’s withdrawal from the Union, according to a new poll feeding attention around a nascent movement to achieve a lawful, peaceful secession.

“About 32 percent of Californians want to create their own country, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll found, including many Democrats who are frustrated with the election of President Trump,” the Hill reported. “Pollsters surveyed 500 Californians between Dec. 6 and Jan. 19. Nationally, 22 percent of respondents favor secession, they found” — a figure, like the California number, sure to have included some people with federalist or libertarian interests in seeing a discussion over the state’s status change.

“Still, half of Californians opposed the idea,” the Los Angeles Times reported, “though Democrats were more inclined to support it than Republicans. The survey found that 60 percent of Republicans gave the idea of peacefully seceding a thumbs down compared with 48 percent of Democrats and 50 percent of independents.”

In 2014, 24 percent of respondents nationwide were found to be amenable to California secession. But in-state, the new percentage represented a big jump. “The 32 percent support rate is sharply higher than the last time the poll asked Californians about secession, in 2014, when one-in-five or 20 percent favored it around the time Scotland held its independence referendum and voted to remain in the United Kingdom,” Newsmax noted. 

Parting ways

Although peaceful secession has long been confined to the realm of political fantasy, California’s perceived increased deviation from broader political trends nationwide has helped ensure the scheme a prominent place in the popular imagination and the press. “Even though California is the most populous state in the union and has the sixth-largest economy in the world, secession would be, realistically speaking, very difficult,” as the San Francisco Chronicle noted. “Two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of U.S. states (at least 38) would need to approve of the creation of an amendment that would allow for the legality of the state’s withdrawal.” But California Democrats, leery of losing ground on several fronts, have taken advantage of the state’s big popular vote margin in favor of Hillary Clinton to promise a continuation of their hallmark policies. 

“It may not be ‘Calexit’ — the name of a decidedly quixotic campaign for California to withdraw from the union — but it is turning into what is, for all intents and purposes, a slow-motion secession,” the New York Times suggested. “California is becoming to Mr. Trump what Texas — which is as Republican as California is Democratic — was to President Obama: a sea of defiance and a potential source of unending legal and legislative challenges.” On the other hand, “it will be difficult for California to promote the kind of spending program[s] lawmakers want to make up for cuts in Washington, particularly on health care,” the Times observed, complicating the rosy picture summoned by secessionist leaders of a prosperous march to the beat of the state’s own drum. 

Style or substance

For members of Yes California, the quixotic group working hardest toward secession, the increased popularity of a break with the union came as welcome news that seemed to square with their expectations. “We always thought that if we just connected with the people who thought about this, but didn’t tell their friends and family because they would be seen as kooky and weird, that the quiet population would become vocal,” as Marcus Evans, vice president of Yes California, told the Sacramento Bee. 

Nevertheless, growing support could be largely symbolic — a familiar way of expressing dissatisfaction with national politics. “California isn’t the only state which has flirted with abandoning the U.S.,” as HotAir pointed out. “Prior to the election, Public Policy Polling, which often asks gag questions intended to embarrass Republicans, found that 40 percent of Texans would consider secession if Clinton won the election.”

The campaign to place California secession on the ballot next election year entered uncertain waters as news broke that its mastermind lives and works in a city in the center of Russia. 

“I immigrated to California, and I consider myself to be a Californian,” Louis Marinelli told The California Report from his Yekaterinburg apartment, KQED reported. “I wanted to handle some personal issues in my family, regarding immigration. My wife is from Russia. I’m here handling various personal issues. But at the same time, we have some political goals we can achieve while I’m here.” 

From founding to funding

Marinelli’s deep Russian ties, past and present, attracted attention as he took his current stay in the country as an opportunity to start work on a so-called “embassy of California” in Moscow. That undertaking, as Bloomberg noted, has the aid of “a vehemently anti-American group supported by the Kremlin” — the Anti-Globalist Movement of Russia — which Marinelli said supports California’s right to self-determination. “Talking to the Russian tabloid Life, Alexander Ionov, the president of the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia, said that the embassy would serve as a hub to boost tourism and foster cultural and economic exchanges between the Golden State and Russia,” Heat Street reported. 

“We may disagree on several issues, but if we have common ground on one issue, why shouldn’t we have a dialogue?” Marinelli asked Bloomberg. But he has already begun to hit against the limits of that rhetoric. 

“Marinelli’s Russian connection has created a schism, if not quite the Great Schism, in the breakaway movement with members of the California National Party, a group that is formally affiliated with Yes California but has publicly disavowed Marinelli as a Russian marionette. Silicon Valley investor and Hyperloop co-founder Shervin Pishevar briefly became another standard-bearer of ‘Calexit,’ as it come to be known, threatening Marinelli’s virtual monopoly on the cause, but backed off, saying he didn’t really support secession.”

The Trump factor

But crisis management was not the only reason Yes California accelerated its timetable to land their initiative on the California ballot in 2018. (According to the prospective measure’s language, voting yes “would trigger a special election the following March in which residents would decide if ‘California should become a free, sovereign and independent country,'” as the San Jose Mercury News observed.) Donald Trump’s election provoked a degree of dismay among some California Democrats intense enough to suggest a secessionist movement could take advantage while passions remained relatively hot.

“It wasn’t until Trump’s victory last month that mainstream U.S. outlets — including the Sacramento Bee, the L.A. Times and NPR — covered the group more seriously,” KQED noted. “The story got new legs because several influential tech figures took to Twitter to voice their desire for California to leave the union after Trump’s election. Among them was Shervin Pishevar, an investor and co-founder of Hyperloop One, a startup promoting a futuristic new transportation technology.”

Although no elected officials have promoted the breakaway effort, tempers have flared around the idea that a Trump presidency would try to stymie state Democrats, seen by many party members nationwide as a progressive vanguard on social and environmental issues. 

In a recent San Francisco speech before the American Geophysical Union, for instance, Gov. Jerry Brown vowed to press ahead with the state’s current climate policy regardless of what happens in Washington. “If Trump turns off the satellites, California will launch its own damn satellite,” he said, according to the IBTimes. “We’ve got the scientists, we’ve got the lawyers and we’re ready to fight.” 

Rough going

Despite the flurry of attention, from Russia, Marinelli’s personal political reach in California was likely to remain limited. To date, his track record has been spotty. He “filed a handful of statewide ballot measures related to secession in 2015 and none qualified for the November ballot,” the Sacramento Bee recalled. “He also waged an unsuccessful campaign to represent state Assembly District 80, but didn’t advance beyond the June primary.”

Proving out the maxim that some things never go out of style however unpopular they are, a group of California secessionists announced plans to follow up this year’s momentous presidential election with a rally for Golden State independence in Sacramento. 

“The Yes California Independence Campaign, which is based in San Diego, is aiming to qualify a citizen’s initiative in 2018 to get a referendum for secession on the ballot in 2019,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

“While the notion of an independent California does seem well-intended — points about immigration, environmental concerns, and education are thoughtful — the practicality of such a proposal is tenuous at best,” the paper concluded.

Revisionist history

The invitation to the Nov. 9 rally casts the Golden State in the role of a republic that was all but annexed by the United States. “In the 166th year of Congress admitting California as a U.S. state without the consent of the people of California itself, we will be organizing an all-day informational booth on the front steps of the California Capitol culminating in an evening independence rally beginning at 5:00 PM the day after Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton is elected president of United States because no matter who is elected, California deserves its independence,” the invitation read. 

“California was admitted as a state on September 9, 1850 as the result of a deal struck in Washington where the south agreed to admit California as a free state in exchange for the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act (which required northerners to return escaped slaves to their masters in the south), and for the expansion of slavery into the Utah and New Mexico territories.”

The group has already amassed 14,600 likes on Facebook despite admittedly quixotic aims: a much more popular recent push for an independent Texas swiftly ran aground on constitutional legal issues. “After President Obama was re-elected in 2012, more than 125,000 people signed a petition asking for the government to allow the Lone Star State to go its own way,” the Washington Post recalled this summer. “That sentiment was revisited earlier this year, with Republican activists in Texas pushing to include a pro-secession plank in the party platform. (It didn’t happen.)”

Precedent and procedure

Yes California brainchild Louis Marinelli got a summertime publicity boost in the wake of the surprise Brexit result, which many analysts nervously or approvingly cited as a likely trend of populist decentralization throughout the western world. “This is the first Western secessionist movement that worked, and I think that is going to be very profound,” he told Newsweek. “Are you going to say to people in the freest country in the world (you) don’t have the right to self-determination?”

“For Marinelli, who is originally from Buffalo, New York, but calls California home, the commonalities between Brexit and Calexit, are clear: Both the United Kingdom and California feel disenfranchised by professional politicians in distant capitals (Brussels and Washington D.C.), strangled by over-regulation on trade and don’t feel they get enough value for their tax dollars.”

Faced with the prevailing constitutional interpretation that peaceable secession is effectively impossible, Yes California has worked through a response. “California cannot unilaterally declare itself independent of the United States even though the original 13 colonies unilaterally declared their independence from England,” as the group allowed on it website. Instead, it argued, Texas v. White, an 1869 case, indicates “several paths to legal and peaceful secession.” First, however, “it will be necessary for Californians to weigh in on the matter, which is what Yes California’s 2020 independence referendum is about. If there is no mandate from the people to secede, there is no reason for us to embark on this long and difficult legal journey to achieve that goal. So, an independence referendum on the ballot goes first.”

According to Yes California, the next step would either require a constitutional amendment to permit California’s departure from the Union or a convention of the states which would lead amicably to the same result. 

Although Louis Marinelli has launched a campaign to represent the San Diego area in the state Assembly, he has also helped found the California National Party, an independence movement angling to put its scheme before voters this November. Marinelli told Vice the name was “inspired by the Scottish National Party,” with its Yes California campaign serving as “a nod to Yes Scotland, the unsuccessful campaign in support of a ‘Yes’ vote in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum.”

For now, Yes California has not done much to raise expectations to Scottish heights. “So far, the metrics are not encouraging,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “Last year, the group raised $10,000, Marinelli said. So far, only 300 people have signed up as volunteers on his website.”

A string of failures

Californians’ rogue experiments with independence have a habit of attracting more notice than support. With his Six Californias initiative, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper “spent $5.2 million on signature-gathering, but couldn’t come close to the needed number of voter autographs,” the Los Angeles Daily News recalled. “It was the worst failure in the modern era for any proposed citizen initiative with respectable financial support.” Only the longstanding effort to carve a rural statelet from southern Oregon and Northern California has kept up a trace of momentum; advocates “took their proposed secession plan to the Legislature early this year, where it got a modicum of press coverage but was never taken seriously,” according to the Daily News.

The breakaway movement, which would create a state of Jefferson, has played neatly into the hands of observers for whom secession is virtually synonymous with Confederate-style backwoods values. “Cut off from the seats of power by geography, alienated by the state’s left-leaning politics and tendency toward regulation, enduring stubbornly high unemployment, facing the decimation of traditional industries such as logging, and harboring few prospects for economic growth, these disaffected citizens — overwhelmingly white and mostly conservative — share many of the concerns about central state overreach as the militia members who recently took control of a wildlife refuge in Oregon,” as the New York Daily News recently noted, allowing that Jeffersonians “are committed to a political solution rather than an armed rebellion.”

Turning left

Yet the nascent movement for an independent California has underscored how secession has become increasingly attractive to progressives rather than reactionaries. “I think a lot of the reasons why there’s so much gridlock in Washington is because California is there with its own set of values,” Marinelli told Newsy. “We could do universal health care, which is something I’d be for. We could go to universal education.”

Even on common defense, Marinelli implied that an independent California should pass on interventions unpopular with California’s left-leaning electorate. “We’re going to continue to do commerce with the Americans and be a part of the Americans in other areas, such as military involvement when our goals are aligned,” he said. “Fundamentally, we have a problem with the United States,” he told the Times. “Ideologically they are very different from us — their agenda, their militarism, their imperialism and colonialism. The United States is always at war. We don’t want to bomb other countries.”

“Marinelli supports a single-payer health care system, reproductive rights, public financing for political campaigns, a path to citizenship for immigrants who are in California illegally, and criminal justice and police reform,” according to the Times. “He thinks the Pledge of Allegiance is propaganda,” the paper added, and, in an ironic twist, “believes that California does not receive its fair share of federal dollars.”