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While California isn’t unusual among states in that its first residents were Native Americans who were violently removed from their land by Europeans, its geography and its long history under Spanish and Mexican control have made California distinct.

Briefly, in 1846, a group of American settlers rebelled against Mexican authorities and declared a “Republic of California.”

In September 1850, California became a state.

“The historian in me wants to go back to the days of the Gold Rush, and the notion that California was so far beyond the reaches of the union itself,” Mr. Deverell said.

More recently, in the late 1960s, California pushed for many of the environmental regulations that would eventually become federal law. And during the AIDS crisis, Californians’ activism was far ahead of the federal government, he said.

Still, in the Trump era, the divide between California’s leaders and the federal government has become wider and more explicit, and the response to the pandemic has made it even more stark.

“The union is set up with this glorious tension,” Mr. Deverell said. Mr. Newsom’s description of California as a nation-state is “a recognition of that tension, which has been exacerbated in recent years by the blueness of California and the redness of the administration.”

[Should leaders in Western states get more credit for taking early action to fight the coronavirus?]

Still, the question of whether California is a nation-state doesn’t have a clear answer, said Henry Brady, dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley.