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The problem with doing this is that this is unequivocally and permanently bad for Blue power.
Which, obviously, Blues won't like; since this will create a permanent Red Senate that can just block Blue policy goals (which will tilt the balance of power even more in the relatively-unaccountable executive direction) and has long-term ramifications about how their Tribe can exert influence going forward (since a sudden loss of territory in close proximity to the cities opens the door to massive State income and sales tax arbitrage, resource extraction is still rather lucrative in the states that have them, lawfare/process-as-punishment against Blue policies is more practical due to newly-independent police, etc.).
And sure, it's possible to create new states such that it advantages both Blue and Red, but doing that would require nonsense solutions that create city-states in flyover country (because cities are the only places that vote Blue, almost like the Blues are a purpose-built city interest faction or something). Sure, it could give the political situation a chance to stabilize if there were any other fault-lines other than "urban core" vs. "everyone else", but the economy has been hollowed out so much that I'm not convinced it's even possible (as the nation to the immediate north demonstrates: the "third way" Western left party was extraordinarily strong ~15 years ago, but is on track to disappear entirely in the next election).
Really? I’m pretty sure this is considered a Blue policy, though it might depend on the construction. Overall the Democrats usually win the popular vote but the Senate skews Red, this proposal is intended to level out the disparity between the two. Merging in particular disfavors Red, since rural states are lower population.
No, the trickiest issue is that even if we could balance the Red/Blue short term impact, it’s hard to actually draft a workable compromise because literally every state needs to individually give specific consent to border modification. Any one single state could torpedo the whole deal. There’s currently only a few places that would probably assent right away: for example Eastern Oregon has long wanted to join Idaho, and honestly they are a great fit.
I am visualizing an approach that would keep as many current state borders as-is as possible. So in practice we wouldn’t be gerrymandering cities, just slicing up bigger states into logical regions. For example California seems to be able to split in either 2 or 3, vertically stacked, without too much issue.
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A North/South/West Texas split would create three upper-end-of average states, all of which would be pretty red. You could do a state of Rio Grande, which would probably be swingy, but look like obvious gerrymandering, or a set of even more obviously gerrymandered exclaves that are solid blue states. Ditto Louisiana; the obvious split would be north/south, both of which would be small red states.
But nobody's proposing those sets of splits. The main demand for a new state is to split off eastern Oregon- again, pretty red. Likewise, Northern California has a fairly fringe but real movement to split off from California; this is a red-leaning state of Jefferson. Upstate New York has wanted to split in the past, I doubt they're going to be a blue state.
For some reason, the people who actually want to have their state split up such that they're under a different government are all republicans with democrat-controlled state governments.
Whereas the split they'd actually need to come up with would be "State of Austin" and "State of Texas", since Austin's policy goals are quite a bit more suppressed by the rest of the state than the converse [whether the policies Austin wants are right or wrong is out of scope].
Which is why I think that, if we wanted it to be perceived as fair by both sides, it'd have to be city-states made up of Blue cities in perma-Red states- as this is the reverse of the "some reason" you're hinting at (which, again, comes down to "consent of the governed is not equally geographically distributed", and both Blues and Reds have motivated reasoning for not understanding that).
But nobody seems to want that. Even in blue cities on the borders of red states(that is, not Austin), they usually don't want to have a different state. I don't think there's any movement for Kansas City to be its own state. Nor New Orleans or Miami.
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