On Tuesday, November 3, voters in 11 Illinois counties will face a question that sounds like the start of a new map of America: should their county boards talk to other counties about leaving Cook County behind and forming a new state? The Illinois separation vote will not create a 51st state, redraw a single border, or move a single county line. But if all 11 counties say yes, 44 of Illinois's 102 counties — more than two in five — will have voted in favour of exploring separation, and the protest that state leaders have long dismissed as a stunt will be harder than ever to ignore.
The campaign behind the votes, Illinois Separation, has already won advisory referendums in 33 counties. The 11 counties voting this year are Piatt, Coles, Henderson, McDonough, Warren, Macoupin, Monroe, Washington, Hamilton, Saline and Gallatin. Several townships in Adams County are also expected to consider similar questions, and Ford County has a separate advisory referendum that Illinois Separation says is not affiliated with its campaign — which is why some round-ups count 12 counties voting on separation this year rather than 11. Either way, the direction is the same: a movement that began in the state's rural south and west is spreading, county by county, towards the centre of the state.
Supporters say they are not trying to leave Illinois so much as to leave a system in which, as they see it, Chicago and Cook County decide everything. Opponents, including Governor JB Pritzker, say separation will never happen and that the votes are a distraction from the real work of fixing the state. Former Governor Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat who governed from 2003 to 2009, has added an unusual voice to the debate: he sympathises with the grievance, blames Pritzker for fuelling it, and still insists the answer is to vote leaders out, not to split the state in two.
The 2026 ballot push was reported on October 25 by The Chicago Focal, which named the 11 counties and stressed the limited legal effect of the questions. Voters are not being asked to secede. They are being asked whether their county board should correspond with the boards of other counties outside Cook County about the possibility of separating from Cook County to form a new state and seeking admission to the Union as such, subject to the approval of the people.
That wording matters, because it explains both the campaign's strategy and its limits. A single county cannot leave Illinois on its own, and a referendum cannot force the legislature to act. What the votes do is build a map — county by county, election by election — of places where a majority of voters are willing to say, on the record, that they would rather start over than stay in the current arrangement. Illinois Separation's director, Loret Newlin, told The Chicago Focal that the new counties show the movement is no longer confined to one corner of the state. She pointed to Iroquois County, south of Kankakee County, where 73 percent of voters backed an advisory referendum, and to Madison County, one of the state's most populous counties, as evidence that support extends beyond the rural south.
Newlin's own summary of the grievance is blunt. Supporters believe their concerns are overlooked by state leaders, she said: "This is our lived experience. We are ignored. We are not taken into consideration when they're making a lot of the laws that hurt us." She added that counties near the Chicago area have asked about putting similar questions on future ballots, suggesting the next frontier for the campaign could be closer to the metropolis it wants to leave.
The campaign's immediate test, however, is simpler: whether voters in the 11 counties endorse asking their boards to explore the idea at all. A clean sweep would take the total to 44 counties. A mixed result — some yes, some no — would still leave the movement with the largest bloc of counties it has ever assembled, but would give opponents a ready argument that momentum has stalled.
Illinois has heard versions of this argument before. In the 1970s, a coalition of 16 west-central counties calling itself the Republic of Forgottonia drew attention to disinvestment in the region before abandoning its push; according to the Macomb Area Conventions and Visitors Bureau, the effort helped bring renewed focus to transportation and infrastructure needs in the area. The modern separation campaign is more organised, with county committees, a yearly convention and constitutional processes run through a parallel group, New Illinois, whose stated goal is to rally counties outside Cook County to effectively kick themselves out of Illinois.
The deeper grievance, as set out by analysts sympathetic to downstate complaints, dates to 1964, when the Supreme Court's Reynolds v. Sims decision changed how state senators were elected, from geographic-based to population-based representation. From that point, political power in Springfield followed population, and population in Illinois means Chicago. Cook County alone accounts for nearly 41 percent of the state's population, and the next four most populous counties, all bordering Cook County, account for another 22 percent. All lean Democratic. Just 14 counties voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, yet she carried the state by more than 600,000 votes, an 11-point margin — a result that, for separation supporters, captures the whole problem in a single statistic.
The demographic backdrop sharpens the feeling. Illinois has lost a net 1.6 million people to other states since 2000 — 5.7 million moved out and 4.1 million moved in, according to Internal Revenue Service migration data cited by Fight for Illinois, a group that opposes breaking up the state but has documented the movement in detail. Only New York and California have lost more people over the same period. The people behind the separation votes, that analysis argues, are not so different from the people who already left; they simply want to leave Illinois without actually moving — to stay in their own homes, towns and farms, in a new state.
The economic gap is just as stark in the same analysis. Cook County's average weekly wage is $1,740, and the state average is $1,539, but the 33 counties that have already voted to separate average just $1,079 a week — about $650, or nearly 40 percent, less than Cook County. In 2023 alone, more than 22,000 Illinoisans moved to Indiana while only about 16,000 Hoosiers moved into Illinois, a net gain of nearly 6,000 for Indiana. That flow is part of why Indiana's Republican House leadership last year proposed a dual-state boundaries commission to absorb disaffected Illinois counties, with Speaker Todd Huston telling neighbours to the west: "To all of our neighbors in the West, we hear your frustrations and invite you to join us in low-cost, low-tax Indiana."
It is worth being precise about what a yes vote does and does not do, because the campaign's critics and its supporters often talk past each other on this point. A yes vote does not create a new state, does not transfer any county to Indiana, and does not change any law. It instructs — in advisory, non-binding terms — a county board to open correspondence with other county boards about separation. That is the whole legal effect.
Anything further would run into Article IV, Section 3 of the US Constitution, which provides that no new state shall be formed within the jurisdiction of any other state without the consent of that state's legislature and of Congress. In Illinois, Democrats hold a supermajority in both houses of the General Assembly, and the governor has dismissed the movement outright. In Congress, a new-state bill would need majorities in both chambers and the president's signature. Every one of those hurdles is, for now, insurmountable — a point even the movement's sympathisers concede.
Supporters cite two historical precedents, both noted by The Chicago Focal. West Virginia was created during the Civil War from territory that had been part of Virginia, and Maine separated from Massachusetts and was admitted to the Union in 1820. Both cases, however, involved exceptional political circumstances — a civil war in one, a long-negotiated compromise in the other — and neither offers a simple template for a peacetime split of one of America's largest states.
The campaign's real leverage, then, is political rather than legal. Each advisory vote gives downstate complaints a number, a map and a headline. A vote of 73 percent in Iroquois County is hard to dismiss as a fringe view. Forty-four counties voting the same way would be harder still. The question for Springfield is not whether a new state will be created in 2027 — it will not — but whether the accumulation of these votes eventually forces a different conversation about representation, taxes and investment outside the Chicago metropolitan area.
Governor Pritzker's position has been consistent and dismissive. A spokesperson for the governor has previously called the separation effort a stunt and said it would not happen. Pritzker himself, asked about residents who want to leave, said in April: "If people want to leave, then get up and move." He has also rejected Indiana's overture, calling it a stunt and describing Indiana as a low-wage state that does not protect workers or provide healthcare for people in need — claims that Fight for Illinois argues are contradicted by federal economic data showing Indiana's economy growing faster than Illinois's, adding workers, and carrying a AAA credit rating while Illinois has the nation's worst.
Blagojevich, speaking to Newsmax on October 26, offered a more complicated verdict. "For the six years that I was governor of Illinois, nobody was talking about seceding from Illinois when I was governor," he told "The Record With Greta Van Susteren." "This is a product of Gov. Pritzker and his mismanagement." He said residents outside Chicago feel their interests are ignored by state leaders who depend heavily on votes from the Chicago metropolitan area: "And so the people in those other counties understandably don't feel like they're getting represented. It's taxation without representation, as far as they're concerned."
Blagojevich cited high taxes, crime, and the departures of major companies including Citadel and Caterpillar, and criticised state spending on migrants and policies eliminating cash bail. "The problem with Chicago isn't Chicago or the people in it. It's the leaders," he said. But he drew a firm line at separation itself: "The good news is that in the land of Lincoln, I don't think secession is going to work. I don't think it could happen legally. The remedy is to vote these people out." He also urged Illinois Republicans to reorganise, calling the state party "a very weak party" that needs to become more active and modernised.
Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner, writing for Fight for Illinois, reach a similar conclusion from the opposite starting point. They oppose breaking up Illinois and want it returned to being a top-growth, destination state through reform of its governance. But they warn that ignoring the separation voters is a mistake: "To do so is a mistake. For a state that's creating so many problems for its people, it's absolute arrogance." Their analysis also cautions against reading every advisory vote as a literal demand for secession, noting that whether such high percentages of voters are really up for separation is an open question — but that, at a minimum, the votes are a major indication of frustration and protest.
The Illinois votes matter for three reasons that go beyond Illinois. First, they are a measurable expression of the urban-rural divide that now shapes American politics almost everywhere. When 41 percent of a state's people live in one county, and that county's politics differ sharply from the rest of the state, the losers in the statewide count will eventually look for an exit — even a symbolic one. Illinois is simply the place where that search has gone furthest, fastest, and most visibly.
Second, the movement is part of a wider American pattern. In Oregon, 13 counties have spent years discussing joining neighbouring Idaho, for much the same reason: the influence of Portland, the state's largest metropolis, over how the rest of the state is governed. The Illinois and Oregon movements use different mechanisms — advisory county votes in one, cross-state transfer proposals in the other — but they share a grievance, and their parallel growth suggests the Illinois votes are not an isolated curiosity.
Third, the votes land in the middle of a midterm election in which control of Congress, and the political future of both parties in Illinois, is at stake. A strong separation vote on November 3 will be read in Springfield as a verdict on the Pritzker administration's relationship with downstate Illinois, just as a weak vote will be read as a sign that the movement has peaked. Either way, the results will shape how state leaders talk about taxes, representation and regional investment in the months after the election — which is, for a non-binding vote, a considerable amount of power.
Polls close on November 3, and the county-by-county results will be the first real test of whether the movement is still expanding. Watch three things: whether all 11 counties approve, which would take the total to 44; whether the margins resemble the 70-percent-plus majorities seen in earlier counties or narrow considerably in the more populous new counties such as Macoupin and Coles; and whether Ford County's separate referendum also passes, which would change how the night's total is counted.
After the votes, the campaign's next steps are already visible. Newlin has said counties near the Chicago area have asked about putting similar questions on future ballots, so the map could keep growing in 2028 and beyond. Indiana's boundaries-commission proposal, meanwhile, remains on the table as a rival route for disaffected counties — absorption into a neighbouring state rather than creation of a new one — though it faces the same constitutional hurdles.
What will not happen next is a new state. No bill will be introduced in Springfield with any prospect of passage, and no member of Congress is championing Illinois's division. The honest forecast is a longer, slower story: more advisory votes, more maps, more arguments about who Illinois is for — until either Springfield changes how it governs downstate, or downstate finds a louder way to be heard.
It is a set of non-binding advisory referendums in 11 Illinois counties on November 3, 2026, asking whether each county board should correspond with other counties outside Cook County about the possibility of separating from Cook County to form a new state and seeking admission to the Union, subject to voter approval.
Piatt, Coles, Henderson, McDonough, Warren, Macoupin, Monroe, Washington, Hamilton, Saline and Gallatin. Several townships in Adams County are also considering similar questions, and Ford County has a separate, unaffiliated advisory referendum, which is why some tallies count 12 counties.
No. A yes vote only authorises county boards to talk to each other about separation. Under Article IV of the US Constitution, creating a new state from existing state territory requires the consent of the state legislature and Congress, neither of which is forthcoming.
Thirty-three counties have approved similar advisory measures, many with more than 70 percent of the vote, including 73 percent in Iroquois County. If all 11 new counties approve on November 3, the total will reach 44 of Illinois's 102 counties.
They say Cook County, with about 41 percent of the state's population, dominates state politics, and that downstate concerns about taxes, jobs, schools and representation are ignored in Springfield. Critics, including Governor JB Pritzker, call the effort a stunt; former Governor Rod Blagojevich sympathises with the grievance but says the remedy is to vote out current leaders, not to split the state.
Related coverage: Dark money midterms 2026: $1 billion in secret cash floods US races, the DOJ's Alaska Senate certification lawsuit and powder letters to Congress: Illinois man charged in election-week hoax case.
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