Western Maryland asks West Virginia to 'consider adding us' to their state

You'd still have major urban areas mostly controlling each state but fighting the rest of the state every step of the way. It works from a "keep the number of red and blue senators" fairly constant perspective but it doesn't actually solve anybody's complaints about lack of self-government.

Not really, even on the scale of “crazy proposals to divide California into multiple states” , of which there have been a couple hundred since it was admitted to the union.

> it would have given the people living there more representation in congress in the form of 4 new senators, as well as more local control

Sure, and Cal58 (each existing county as its own state) would give them 114 new senators, and even more local control, by the same standards. Cal3 retained the main “problem” most recent “split California” proposals aim to fix, the perceived representation problem (particularly in the statewide executive and U.S. Senate) resulting from the deepest red parts of the State (which are on par with some of the deepest red parts of the country) being diluted in a big blue state. Two of the three Cal3 states (NorCal, Cal) would have been solid blue, including the one with the reddest parts of the existing State (Cal), and the other (SoCal) would have (at least, from the political state at the time) been fairly competitive (though also pretty solidly blue, in Presidential terms, if 2016 and 2020 worked out the same way by county.)

It also would have turned a lot of broad issues in the State, which cross the proposed borders, into potential federal issues, reducing local control (and also reducing the possibility of any favorable action in the presence of federal hostility – common given the structural rightward tilt of federal representation [which, while it would help a tiny bit with, it wouldn't neutralize] – or deadlock.)

> You would think that there would be broad support for the proposal considering a lot of people in these large left-leaning states often complain that their vote is not “worth as much” as a vote in a less populated state.

You would think that if you were thinking shallowly about that one complaint, and not the whole host of issues involved in splitting up an existing state.

If you want pure proportional representation then you need to dismiss senate, and change congressional election to nation wide proportional system. Afterwards you wouldn’t even need states anymore.

Hence why senators are elected for 6 years, because states interests don't change that often and the house every 2, in order for the people to have as much influence as possible.

Same reason all tax bills have to start in the house, why senators weren't elected by popular vote.

To say that one party doesn’t want people to be represented at all is a ridiculous straw-man.

I think that's worth considering. It would get rid of a lot of the left/right gridlock at state levels. Cities would be mostly free to do as they wish without rural areas holding them back and rural areas would be free to do as they wish without cities holding them back. This would also greatly reduce the amount of BS that needs to get done at the federal level because a ton of that stuff is not interstate issues but an end run around the fact that the blue team and the red team can't do what they want at the state level so they try and get the feds to do it to the whole country.

And before anyone says "but money" I would like to remind them that freedom isn't free.

Every metro with population above median or average of existing US states should have the option of forming a new state. Seems to work for Berlin/Bremen/Hamburg in Germany, and various metros in other countries.

Furthermore, I'm not sure your conjecture is even correct. Subsistence farming supported people for centuries before our megalopolises existed.