Maybe we need an Electoral College system of elections for the states. Many states have the same problems with the heavily populated cities, mostly socialistic, having enough votes to determine political policies for every one. Most of the time, politicians know they only need the majority votes of the cities to win and do not regard other parts of the state.
We used to. CA originally had two chambers, one with representation by county and one by population, just like the United States. Then the Supremes ruled that representation by political subdivision was not allowed and both houses are now only by population.
As a guy who escaped CA to southern Oregon the only thing I don't like about a state of Jefferson is that the CA part is used to a ~10% sales tax and we will probably get that. In OR the sales tax is 0.
The simple contiguous district system tends to have an anti-city bias.Here in PA we have great difficulty electing Republicans statewide - because of the cities - but it takes no great feat of gerrymandering to obtain a surprisingly strong Republican majority in the legislature and in the congressional representation.
The object of gerrymandering is to lose as few districts as possible, by means of concentrating opposition support in districts your opponent will win by lopsided margins. And the fact that Democrats cluster in the cities makes it easy and “natural” to draw districts which accomplish that for Republicans. So it doesn’t look like a gerrymander with weird district lines when the Republicans do it, but if the Democrats shaped the districts in a way to just give themselves and even break it would look on a map like an obvious gerrymander.