ADIN, Modoc County — On the afternoon before the primary election last week, Frank Castaneda, a shopkeeper in the remote agricultural town of Adin, was upset. Due to a newly redrawn congressional district map, the election was the first time voters in Modoc County were mushed in with their ideological opposite: voters in Marin County.

“We lost our voice,” Castaneda told me by a window in his general store. “We’re a small community that’s now beholden to the people in the Bay Area.”

Castaneda and his wife, Mariana, took over the Adin Supply Company in April, leaving behind Southern California to embrace conservative values in the farthest northeast corner of the state. That morning, Castaneda said he poured coffee for ranchers who were up all night guarding cattle from the looming threat of wolves. The endangered species is just one wedge between environmentalists in the Bay Area and ranchers in Modoc County. It’s an urgent example to illustrate the stark division in politics between folks in rural and urban California.

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Frank Castaneda inside the Adin Supply Company on June 1, 2026.

Adin Supply Company is one of two prominent businesses in town (the other is a frosty stand) and serves as a hub for the 200 or so people living near the front door into Modoc County. It was the first stop on my tour of the county. Proposition 50 folded — or gerrymandered, depending on who’s speaking — Modoc into the same district as Marin, where I grew up. I wanted to talk to voters who live on the opposite end of the district, both geographically and politically.

I visited during election week and asked Modoc locals how they felt about their democratic voice being effectively marginalized. 

“We don’t have as many people so there’s not as big of a voice,” said a rancher in Adin named Laurel Ybarra, before paraphrasing a much-derided doctrine that reshaped rural voting in America: “They say you don’t count rocks and trees,” she added.

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Ybarra was referencing the landmark Supreme Court decision Reynolds v. Sims, which codified the electoral principle of “one person, one vote.” Due to the 1964 ruling, state legislative districts must be roughly equal in population, and ever since, the ruling has weakened rural voter power by favoring more populated urban areas. 

Some folks in Modoc continue to reel from the 62-year-old ruling; Prop. 50 was merely the latest salvo in the ongoing clash between the city and the country.  

“We have mining, timber and water — all the food is grown out here,” Ybarra said. “You like hamburgers? This is where they start out.”

Open space and elbow room typically define Modoc, where about 8,500 people live among vast valleys molded by the splitting of the Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges. Their rugged fray forms the last frontier of California. Slightly smaller than Los Angeles County in square mileage, Modoc couldn’t exist further away from the state’s metropolitan areas in terms of politics. 

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Seventy percent of voters consistently turned out for Donald Trump over the previous three elections, and, in response to Proposition 50 last fall, Modoc voters soundly rejected redrawing the congressional district map. 

The near 80% disapproval was the polar opposite of opinion of those in Marin, who voted with an 80% approval of the new maps. After passing, the proposition looped the two counties together in a district map that resembles the outline of an old fur hat like the one Davy Crockett........

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