America’s rural-urban divide nurtures wannabe state-splitters

Illinois has only one true metropolis, the city of Chicago. It does, however, have another Metropolis, a pretty little town of around 6,000 people on the border with Kentucky which rather implausibly claims to be the hometown of Superman. And in Metropolis they would rather not have the metropolis. In 2020, 70% of voters in Massac County, which contains Metropolis, opted in a non-binding referendum for the rest of Illinois to separate from Cook County, which contains Chicago and many of its suburbs. That helped start an unlikely state-splitting movement.