On the other hand, California gains an enormous amount of power every four years due to the huge number of electoral college votes it commands. No other single state has anything like California's 55 electoral votes; the next closest is Texas, which has just 38.

In other words, California, all by itself, gets a candidate 20% of the way to the magic 270 votes needed to win the Presidency. This makes it very hard for any serious candidate to ignore or otherwise bypass.

Splitting California up would dilute this power, allowing candidates to write off parts it more easily. It would be interesting to take the 2012 election results and map them to Draper's proposed new states to see how those "states" would have voted, had they existed then.