Your analogy is faulty. You would not have a table for each state, territory, protectorate - that would be 50+ tables all with identical structure. If the U.S. ever annexed another such entity, that would be a major modification of db structure (tables, queries, forms, reports, code).
Should be one table and apply filter criteria to view only CA cities. What if you wanted to see cities from ID and CA and WA? How would you query that if multiple tables are used? Another aspect of normalization is not duplicating structures for same type of data.
It is a balancing act between normalization and ease of data entry/output. "Normalize until it hurts, denormalize until it works."