New Illinois: The Movement to Split the State and Its Barriers

The movement to split Illinois into two states is led by New Illinois, a nonpartisan 501(c)(4) nonprofit founded in June 2018 that wants the 101 counties outside Cook County to break away and form a 51st state, leaving Chicago and its immediate surroundings as what it calls “Old Illinois.”¹ Voters in 33 counties have already passed advisory referendums supporting separation, but legal scholars, state officials, and the movement’s own leaders acknowledge that the constitutional and political hurdles are enormous, and most consider a split extremely unlikely under current conditions.

What Separation Would Actually Look Like

New Illinois proposes a clean geographic division. The 101 counties outside Cook County, plus any outlying portions of Cook County that vote to join, would form the new state. Chicago and areas that prefer to stay put would remain as the existing Illinois.¹ The organization frames the dispute as “urban vs. rural, small town, and suburban” rather than a partisan fight, arguing that policy set in Springfield reflects the priorities of Cook County’s roughly five million residents at the expense of everyone else.²

The group points to three core grievances driving the effort: what it calls extreme gerrymandering that denies downstate residents representative government, a long record of corruption in Springfield, and financial instability including a roughly $175 billion shortfall in state obligations.¹ On October 17, 2020, the organization issued a formal “Declaration of Independence” from the State of Illinois and has since published a running list of grievances covering everything from redistricting to gun rights.³

Who Is Behind the Movement

New Illinois is chaired by G.H. Merritt and organized through county-level committees, each responsible for local outreach and referendum campaigns.⁴ As of early 2022, the organization reported committees in 28 of the state’s 102 counties.⁵ The group held its first public event in Decatur in October 2018 and is incorporated in Wisconsin, a choice the organization says protects it from potential interference by Illinois authorities.

New Illinois is not the only group pushing an Illinois partition. A 2025 joint resolution in the General Assembly, HJR0016, names two others with similar goals: Illinois Separation and The State of Southern Illinois.⁶ New Illinois has specifically cautioned against drawing a line south of Interstate 80 as some others propose, arguing the southern third of the state alone would not be economically viable.¹

The Divide Fueling the Push

The frustration behind the movement rests on real demographic asymmetry. Cook County holds about 40 percent of Illinois’s 12.7 million residents, and the broader Chicago metro area accounts for roughly 9.5 million people.⁷⁸

The split is cultural as well as numerical. Downstate communities that once backed Democrats have shifted steadily toward the Republican Party on cultural issues, while the Chicago region has grown more progressive. A 2018 Paul Simon Institute paper concluded that Illinois politics are “marked and marred by regionalism,” and polling at the time found two-thirds of voters statewide believed the state was headed in the wrong direction.⁷ Illinois Farm Bureau Associate Director Mark Raney summarized the redistricting dynamic bluntly: “The voting map looks really red, but there’s just far less people there. Land does not vote.”⁸

What Voters and Lawmakers Have Actually Done

The movement’s most visible progress has come through county-level advisory referendums. Between 2020 and 2024, voters in 33 of the state’s 102 counties approved nonbinding ballot measures indicating they no longer want to remain part of Illinois in its current form, with an average approval rate of about 74 percent.⁶ Individual results ranged from roughly 70 to 83 percent in favor. Counties that voted in 2024 included Calhoun, Clinton, Greene, Iroquois, Jersey, Madison, and Perry.⁹

These votes carry no legal force. New Illinois acknowledges that a public vote has no formal standing in the constitutional process for splitting a state; the group treats the referendums as tools for building momentum.¹

In Springfield, formal legislation has gotten nowhere. In February 2019, State Rep. Brad Halbrook and co-sponsor C.D. Davidsmeyer introduced House Resolution 101, calling for Chicago itself to become the 51st state. The resolution was sent to the Rules Committee, where it stalled with no hearing scheduled.¹⁰ More recently, HJR0016 was introduced in the 104th General Assembly, urging Congress to separate the 101 downstate counties. It cites the New Illinois movement and the 33 county referendums but remains in the introductory stage.⁶ While initially concentrated downstate, the movement has reportedly drawn interest from some Chicago suburbs as well.⁴

What the Constitution Requires

The legal path runs through Article IV, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution, which allows Congress to admit new states but forbids forming a new state within an existing state’s territory without “the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.”¹¹ In practice, a split would need approval from the Illinois General Assembly, then a bill passed by both chambers of Congress and signed by the president.

New Illinois also invokes the Guarantee Clause of Article IV, Section 4, which requires the federal government to guarantee every state a republican form of government. The organization argues that gerrymandering and corruption have effectively denied downstate residents that guarantee, creating a basis for federal intervention.¹ Legal scholars have not widely accepted this reading.

Why West Virginia Isn’t a Usable Roadmap

The only successful partition of a U.S. state came during the Civil War. After Virginia voted to secede from the Union in 1861, delegates from 39 loyalist northwestern counties formed a “Restored Government of Virginia” under Governor Francis H. Pierpont. That reconstituted legislature consented to its own dismemberment, satisfying Article IV’s requirement of state legislative approval.¹²

President Abraham Lincoln signed the West Virginia statehood bill on December 31, 1862, over a cabinet evenly divided on its constitutionality, characterizing the move as “a measure made expedient by a war” rather than a peacetime precedent.¹³ West Virginia entered the Union as the 35th state on June 20, 1863.¹² In Virginia v. West Virginia (1871), the Supreme Court upheld the partition 6–3, but scholars still debate whether the case truly settles whether a state can be subdivided in peacetime.¹⁴

Why Most Observers Say It Won’t Happen

The most fundamental obstacle is political arithmetic. Because Democrats hold a supermajority in the Illinois General Assembly, the movement would need consent from the very legislature whose composition it exists to protest. Kenneth Owen, a University of Illinois Springfield history professor who studies secession movements, has described the odds of legislative approval as “astronomical.”¹⁵ Governor J.B. Pritzker’s office has dismissed the effort as a “stunt,” with a spokesperson saying, “it’s not going to happen.”¹⁶

Congress presents a second wall. A new state carved from downstate Illinois would almost certainly elect two Republican U.S. senators, shifting the balance of power in a narrowly divided Senate and giving congressional Democrats no reason to agree. Existing states of all sizes also have reasons to resist any expansion of the Senate, which would dilute every current senator’s relative influence.¹⁷

Unresolved constitutional questions add a third layer. Legal scholar Michael Stokes Paulsen has argued that Article IV’s text could be read as an outright prohibition on carving one state into two during peacetime, and it remains unclear whether “the States concerned” would require approval only from existing Illinois or also from the prospective new state.¹⁷

Even some downstate Republicans are skeptical. State Senator Dave Syverson has publicly said a split is not plausible under current law and argues instead for greater inclusion of non-Chicago voices in existing governance.² Other critics have called the movement “performative,” pointing to the absence of a detailed plan for executing a separation if one were somehow authorized.¹⁸

The Economic Problem With the Premise

Data on state tax flows runs against the movement’s core narrative. Research from the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University Carbondale found that downstate Illinois is a net beneficiary of the current arrangement. For every dollar southern Illinois sends to Springfield, it receives $2.81 to $2.88 back in state spending. Central Illinois receives about $1.87 per dollar. Cook County gets roughly 90 to 98 cents back, and suburban counties receive between 53 and 60 cents.¹⁹²⁰

In raw dollars, the Chicago suburbs paid more than $4.2 billion beyond what they received from the state, while downstate areas received approximately $12 billion in spending on roughly $8 billion in taxes paid.²¹¹⁹²⁰ Former U.S. Rep. Cheri Bustos, sympathetic to downstate frustrations, has argued that the state would be worse off economically without Chicago’s tax base.¹⁶ New Illinois proponents dispute the study’s methodology, particularly its inclusion of university spending.⁷

Where Things Stand

New Illinois continues to organize county committees, pursue additional advisory referendums, and draft what it says will become a new state constitution.² The group’s stated long-term strategy is to elect enough sympathetic state legislators to eventually secure the General Assembly consent required under Article IV. The tension in that plan is structural: the same population imbalance that motivates the movement also makes it very hard to assemble a legislative majority in Springfield willing to give the split its blessing.

Owen has suggested the movement’s real function may be less about achieving statehood than about “reopening the social contract” and channeling disaffection through organized political activity. He also warns against writing separation efforts off entirely, noting that they “all sound crazy right up until the time that they happened.”¹⁵

1
New Illinois State. FAQs
2
WIFR. New Illinois Organization Pushes to Separate Cook County
3
New Illinois State. Grievances
4
Axios Chicago. Movement to Divide Illinois Into Two States Gains Traction in Suburbs
5
New Illinois State. History of New Illinois
6
Illinois General Assembly. HJR0016 Full Text
7
Governing. Movement to Divide Illinois Into Two States
8
FarmWeek Now. Population Reshapes Illinois Political Landscape
9
Capitol News Illinois. Voters Consider Ballot Questions on Reproductive Health, Tax Reform, Election Interference
10
ABC News. Resolution Proposes Separating Chicago From Illinois to Create 51st State
11
Congress.gov. Article IV, Section 3
12
Encyclopedia Virginia. West Virginia, Creation Of
13
National Constitution Center. On This Day: West Virginia Starts Controversial Statehood Process
14
West Virginia Encyclopedia. Virginia v. West Virginia
15
NPR. Sometimes Splitting Is a Good Thing: An Illinois Movement Aims to Be the 51st State
16
NBC Chicago. Could Illinois Split in Two? A Deeper Look at the Movement to Divide the State
17
Justia Verdict. A State Divided Against Itself: The Implausible New Illinois Idea
18
WTTW News. Why There Is a Movement From Some Downstate Counties to Split Illinois
19
Southern Illinois University. Research Shows State Funding Disparities Benefit Downstate
20
KFVS12. Paul Simon Public Policy Institute Study Shows Breakdown of Taxes by Region in Illinois
21
Capitol Fax. Simon Institute Funding Disparity Study Gets Wide Coverage