Frequently asked questions

CalExit (a play on "Brexit") is the umbrella term for the idea that California should leave the United States and become an independent country. It is not one organization or one plan — since the term took off after the 2016 presidential election, it has covered a series of ballot-initiative campaigns, a minor political party (California National Party), a research institute (Independent California Institute), and a general current in California politics that surges when Sacramento and Washington are furthest apart.

No. Several distinct groups have carried the banner at different times, and they are not the same people:

• The California National Party is a political party that runs candidates
• The Independent California Institute is a nonprofit think tank that studies independence and autonomy options without campaigning
• Yes California (founded 2015, effectively defunct since 2024) ran the original "Calexit" initiative campaigns
• There was a failed 2025–26 ballot-initiative campaign was led by Marcus Ruiz Evans.

No one person leads CalExit, and no organization speaks for the movement as a whole. Two groups do most of the visible work today. They are separate organizations with different missions, and neither is a successor to the earlier ballot-initiative campaigns.

The Independent California Institute is the research side. It is a 501(c)(3) think tank, founded in 2018 by sponsors of a California autonomy ballot initiative, and its co-founder and executive director is Coyote Codornices Marin. Marin commissions and publishes the institute's Independent California Poll, conducted with YouGov — including the June 2025 survey that recorded 44% support for independence, the highest figure on record — and is the person national outlets most often quote when they cover California independence numbers. The institute researches and publishes rather than campaigns: it runs no candidates, endorses no ballot measures, and describes its role as laying out the facts, options, and tradeoffs so Californians can decide for themselves.

The California National Party is the electoral side, chaired by Sean Forbes. Forbes is a Long Beach private investigator with a master's degree in political science from Cal State Long Beach, and an author and filmmaker. Under his leadership the CNP — which has a written platform and county chapters — has focused on running candidates for office on a program of independence or greater autonomy for California. It is not one of California's six ballot-qualified parties, so its candidates cannot appear on the ballot under its name: Forbes himself ran for governor in the June 2026 primary as a certified write-in candidate, and did not finish in the top two that advance to November.

The names most often attached to CalExit in older coverage belong to campaigns that no longer exist. Yes California and Louis Marinelli ran the original post-2016 initiative drive and are long out of the picture — Yes California disbanded and Marinelli moved to Russia in 2017 (see the Russia question below). A separate 2025–26 initiative effort led by Marcus Ruiz Evans did not qualify for the ballot.

No — they're opposite ideas that often get mixed together. CalExit means California leaving the United States entirely.

Partition proposals — like Tim Draper's "Six Californias" (2014) and "Cal 3" (2018) — would split California into more U.S. states. Partition has its own, different legal route: it requires consent of the state legislature and Congress under Article IV of the U.S. Constitution. There have been over 220 proposals to divide California since statehood; none has succeeded.

A practical problem of almost all of these proposals is that they almost always split the state into a rich half and a poor half. The poor half would find itself barely able to provide minimal services from a very reduced tax base. In the unified California, the poorer counties are heavily subsidized by the richer. They would be faced with having California level taxes and Texas level services, or Texas level taxes and Mexico level services. Without Oil & Gas revenues (Texas) or tourism (Florida), a state cannot have its cake and eat it too.

If you'd like to see how some of the proposed splits would work out, or even try creating your own, head over to CaliSplit to try different ideas and see the results.

No. CalExit.org is an independent, informational reference. It takes no funding and no editorial direction from any campaign, party, or organization on any side of this question, and it does not advocate for or against California independence, any ballot measure, any candidate, or any party. Its publisher's own affiliations are disclosed on the About page. Corrections are welcome at admin@calexit.org.

The short answer is that nobody knows for sure. The Dean of UC Berkeley Law School, Erwin Chemerinsky, writes "The Constitution says absolutely nothing about states choosing to opt out of the United States. It neither prohibits secession nor creates a mechanism for it." ("No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States"). We have detailed coverage of this topic at our Texas vs White page.

People often argue that states have no right to secession on their own. But that's a bit of a misdirection, as proposals are generally for a negotiated exit with the rest of the country.

The argument — often called the compact theory — treats the Union as an agreement among the states: if the federal government breaks the bargain badly enough, the injured state's obligations end. It is the same logic that lets a party walk away from a contract, or a country from a treaty, after a serious breach.

Texas v. White is written to foreclose exactly this. Chief Justice Chase's answer is not that such a breach would be excused, but that the premise is wrong: the Union, on his account, is not a contract among sovereign parties but an older relationship that the Constitution perfected rather than created. If it is not a contract, the remedies of contract law have nothing to attach to. Our Texas v. White page covers that reasoning, the criticism of it, and the related question of whether federal conduct could ever amount to "consent of the States."

History suggests where such disputes actually go. American states have repeatedly claimed the federal government broke faith with them, and the claim has consistently produced confrontation and bargaining rather than departure: the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798–99, New England's Hartford Convention during the War of 1812, and Wisconsin's defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act, which the Supreme Court rejected in Ableman v. Booth (1859). In each case a state asserted that the compact had been violated, and in each case it remained.

Episodes that raise the question keep recurring. In July 2026, a New York Times opinion column by Jeffrey Toobin reported concerns among House Democrats about the machinery for seating a new Congress, noting that the Clerk of the House prepares the roll of members-elect and that a partisan Clerk could in principle leave disputed winners off it. Election-law scholars Matthew Seligman and Edward Foley responded that the Clerk's duty under federal law is ministerial and enforceable in court, and that the closest precedent — the disputed New Jersey delegation known as the Broad Seal War, which paralyzed the House for weeks before it seated the claimants itself in 1840 — suggests the chamber ultimately resolves such fights on its own. The merits of that particular dispute are outside this site's scope, but the pattern is not: interest in independence has always tracked how well Californians feel represented in Washington, which is why the polling record moves with national politics rather than with legal developments.

Ballot initiatives have been designed to create commissions to study the issue or schedule future votes on the topic. None have tried to put the question of secession itself on the ballot. It is unlikely that a future ballot initiative, should it garner sufficient signatures, would try to do anything else.

Tried? No. Have people proposed? All the time: Californians have floated more than 220 proposals to divide the state since 1850 — including the 1859 Pico Act (approved by the legislature and southern-county voters; died in Congress), the 1941 "State of Jefferson" movement in the far north, and Tim Draper's "Six Californias" (2014) and "Cal 3" (2018) initiatives. Full secession campaigns are newer: Yes California (2015) made "Calexit" a household word after the 2016 election, and successor efforts have filed independence-plebiscite initiatives repeatedly since. None has reached a ballot.

You may hear people say that CalExit is a Russian plot or sponsored by Russia. Yet none of the currently active organizations have any connection with Russia. A group that failed to get a ballot measure on the ballot, Yes California, was led by Louis Marinelli, reportedly opened a "Calexit embassy" in Moscow in December 2016 with support from a Kremlin-linked group, and moved to Russia in 2017. Yes California has since disbanded.

The California National Party, which is actively engaged in the political sphere, has to file periodic reports with the government detailing its finances, and no Russian support has been reported.

The California National Party is the dominant force in the political sphere. It has fielded candidates for office as recently as the June 2026 primary election, and looks to continue doing so in the future. Conversely, there are no current or planned attempts at a new ballot initiative at the time of this writing.

Not at present. As of August 2026, no California independence measure appears on the Secretary of State's list of initiatives cleared for circulation, and none has qualified for a ballot.

The most recent effort was led by Marcus Ruiz Evans. A first version cleared for circulation in January 2025 and needed 546,651 valid signatures by July 22, 2025. The campaign chose not to submit any signatures at all. Ruiz Evans said it had gathered roughly the required number but not the margin needed to survive verification — "We felt that we had the requisite number of signatures, but we did not have the insulation amount." That claim has never been tested: because no petitions were filed, no county registrar ever counted them, and there is no public record of how many signatures the campaign actually collected. He refiled on August 11, 2025, and that version was cleared for circulation on October 15, 2025. Its circulation window has since closed without the measure qualifying, again without a verified count.

Because this topic attracts fundraising appeals, it is worth checking any petition you're asked to sign — or donate to — against the Secretary of State's list. Only a measure cleared for circulation can gather valid signatures toward the ballot.

Answers to this question could only come out of the negotiated separation of the state. No reasonable observer doubts that these benefits would be continued in a separated California. There are no examples of developed, western countries that do not have both. Liberal California is more likely to have better benefits for seniors than the USA.

85% of California's water comes from inside the state and no disruption to that is foreseeable. The remainder, 15%, comes from the Colorado River. That water supply would be a topic in secession negotiations. About 80% of the water is used for agriculture, and about 50% of the agriculture benefits other states, so cutting off Colorado river water would cripple food exports to the USA.

California hosts 32 military installations and more than 150,000 personnel — including Camp Pendleton, the Navy's largest state footprint, and major Air Force and testing facilities. An independent California would have to negotiate their status (basing agreements, transfers, or closures) and then either build its own defense force, perhaps taking over any Californian personnel and equipment, or rely on treaties with the country it just left.