Tucson's Pima County Residents Seeking 51st State

HopeTracker | Perhaps Tucson is in Anne’s future after all. We’re accustomed to threats from Texas to leave the United States. And there’s always an undercurrent of the southern states whistling Dixie. 

Long Island has threatened to leave New York state and California could be split in two.

A long-simmering movement by more moderate and liberal residents in southern Arizona has officially launched a drive to create the 51st state, tentatively called Baja Arizona. Backers have until July 5 of 2012 to collect the 48,000 signatures required to quality for a spot on the ballet.

“We at least need to get it on the ballot, as a nonbinding resolution, to ask the people of Pima County if they want to be a part of Arizona,” Tucson attorney Paul Eckerstrom, a former Pima County Democratic chairman who launched the campaign, told Reuters. “All the stars would have to align for this to happen, but it could conceivably happen by the fall of 2013.”

The last successful intrastate secession movement was the formation of West Virginia during the Civil War, writes Reuters.

Although Baja Arizona would be created from just a single county, it would hardly rank as the smallest territory to be granted statehood. Pima County exceeds Rhode Island, Delaware, Connecticut and New Jersey in land mass and surpasses several other states in population, including Alaska, Montana, Wyoming or the Dakotas, according to the U.S. Census.

Left-leaning Pima County and the ultra conservative Phoenix-based political establishment have never waltzed together. Today, the hostitilies sound as if they are beyond resolution.