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Shasta County voters have removed a central figure in the county’s far-right movement from office, even as the fate of a second far-right activist lies in the hands of a powerful oversight board.
Patrick Jones, former chairman of the five-member board, suffered a crushing defeat in the Super Tuesday election, according to results released by the county registrar Friday afternoon. With 98% of votes counted, Jones’ opponent, nonprofit consultant Matt Plummer, had won by a landslide with nearly 60% of the vote.
It was a surprising turning point for Mr. Jones, a gun store owner. In his single term, Mr. Jones emerged as a leading voice for the ultra-conservative insurgency that turned the largely rural Northern California county into a national example of far-right governance and election denialism. did. .
In recent months, Mr. Jones has led a conspiratorial charge to destroy Dominion’s voting machines and return counties to manual vote counting. He helped pass a county resolution pledging allegiance to the Second Amendment and a bill allowing concealed weapons in municipal buildings, contrary to state law.
More broadly, he worked with militias and secessionists in a campaign that dramatically reshaped governance in a county long run by mainstream Republicans.
In another high-profile primary, Supervisor Kevin Klei, a political ally of Jones, survived the recall election by just 46 votes. Klei made headlines last year when he asked Mike Lindell, MyPillow’s chief executive and a supporter of President Trump, to help phase out Dominion Machines.
Meanwhile, Allen Long, a former Redding police lieutenant and relative moderate, was the frontrunner in the race for the vacant seat representing western Shasta County. In a four-way race, Mr. Long received 50.3% of the vote as of Friday, narrowly avoiding a runoff.
During the campaign, Long said many voters shared their fear of what they were hearing from the Board of Supervisors and felt “despair for change.” He said county government should focus on issues like homelessness and making communities safer from wildfires.
“I was watching politics here in the county and I thought, ‘Wow, this has gotten really extreme,'” he said. “We wanted to put us back in the middle.”
Laura Hobbs came in a distant second place with 19% of the vote, and in her candidate statement she described herself as a stay-at-home mom and “100% MAGA and America First.” She recently demonized incumbent Supervisor Mary Rickert, a moderate Republican who regularly opposes Jones and Klei, because her license plate has the number “666.” He accused her of worshiping him.
Rickert led his re-election campaign with 40.4% of the vote, but it appears he will face a runoff against quarry owner Corky Harmon. Wynn Carpenter, a prominent far-right voice in the Jefferson state secession movement, came in third.
Taken as a whole, the election results may signal a shift to Shasta County’s political center, or at least a desire for a local government more focused on day-to-day life and operations.
“The last few years have been very tiring. And it’s difficult,” said Redding resident Jenny O’Connell, who voted in favor of the Cry Co. recall. “People are saying, ‘We just need to stop this.’ All I need is sanity and normalcy.”
“Part of the problem with dealing with constant insanity is that after a while you forget how crazy it was,” she added.
Even if Mr. Klei survives the recall, Mr. Jones’ defeat is expected to upset the leadership of the board, which currently has a 3-2 majority with ultra-conservatives.
Shasta County Supervisor Patrick Jones, pictured here in his family’s Redding gun store, has helped spearhead a far-right shift in local governance.
(Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times)
In an interview Friday, Jones took the loss in stride. With about nine months left in his current term, he said conservatives still have time to implement their agenda.
“I’m really happy,” he said. “We accomplished a lot last year. We still have time this year to continue our policies throughout the year.”
According to the Registrar’s Office, 1,208 ballots have yet to be processed, including some that are damaged or require further investigation.
During vote counting, questions swirled about Jones’ connection to a controversial radio ad that aired a week before the election. It claimed that large numbers of erroneous ballots, including votes for deceased people, were mailed to residents. The ad, which aired on news station KQMS, provided listeners with a phone number to call if they received voting materials that were not theirs.
The county executive office quickly issued a statement saying the ad had not been approved by the Board of Elections or the Board of Supervisors and that the phone number provided was registered to a private citizen.
According to the report, KQMS said Mr Jones and Bev Gray, Mr Jones’ appointee to the newly formed Citizens’ Electoral Commission, were responsible for the ad. Mr. Jones said Gray wrote ads for her but also took her to radio stations to teach her how to record. The radio station said the invoice showed the charges were made to her family’s Redding gun store, Jones Fort.
Jones dismissed concerns about the ad’s validity, accusing opponents of “trying to make something out of nothing.”
The Shasta County District Attorney’s Office said in a statement that the case had been referred for investigation, but did not provide further details.
Jones told the Times: Atty. Stephanie Bridget sent two detectives to the radio station in an “attempt to blackmail” him. “Of course that doesn’t work. She should know better,” Jones said. “If she has that much time, she might want to consider her budget in June.”
Jones, a former mayor of Redding, has joined the far-right as conservative backlash against coronavirus-related lockdowns, masks and vaccines merges with anger over President Trump’s loss in the 2020 election. He was the first person to be elected as a director. (Shasta County overwhelmingly supported his re-election.)
Jones’ first meeting was on January 5, 2021, the day before the deadly siege at the U.S. Capitol. Jones showed up to what was supposed to be a virtual meeting, unlocked the supervisor’s office and let an angry crowd enter the courthouse.
Residents rushed in, unmasked, and some threatened the supervisors, citing so-called government tyranny. “When the ballot box is gone, all that’s left is the cartridge box,” yelled one audience member. “You made the bullet expensive. But luckily the rope is reusable.”
In early 2022, ultra-conservatives funded by former Hollywood film director Riverge Anselmo, who left the county after a land dispute, shocked the state’s political scene by successfully recalling former Republican police chief Leonard Moti. Ta. Due to state coronavirus orders.
Current Board Chairman Klei and Supervisor Chris Källstrom were elected to the Board later that year.
Shasta County Supervisor Kevin Cry poses for a photo at the Sundial Bridge in Redding.
(Ricci Pedroncelli/Associated Press)
In the local vector control committee, a majority of the committee appointed a right-wing political activist who warned that mosquitoes were being used as “flying syringes” for mass vaccination. And they named an outspoken critic of COVID-19 vaccine mandates as the county’s new health officer.
And there were voting machines.
Last year, the Board of Supervisors overturned the county’s election process and terminated its contract with Dominion Voting Systems, citing baseless claims of voter fraud pushed by President Trump. Supervisors chose to hand-count the ballots of more than 112,000 registered voters in the county, making Shasta the largest government agency in the nation to use hand-counting. Voter rights groups were appalled. In October, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law restricting counties from counting votes by hand, which Jones vowed to challenge.
Jones has long directed his ire at longtime Registrar-Recorder Kathy Darling Allen, the only Democrat elected to countywide office, for lying about voting machines. He publicly accused him of following him.
Election workers have been harassed, and during the June 2022 election, someone hung trail cameras (the kind used by hunters to track wildlife) in the alley behind the registrar’s office. Darling Allen, 55, announced she would retire this spring because she was recently diagnosed with heart failure and needs to lower her stress levels.
Plummer, Jones’s opponent, told the Times that he knocked on nearly 9,000 doors during his campaign, saying people don’t want to talk about partisan politics and instead discuss issues that are essential to everyday life, such as crime and roads. He said he liked it.
“We have separated politics from day-to-day issues because so much politics has become about rhetoric and ideology rather than core issues,” Plummer said.
Many residents are tired of this drama.
John Deaton participated in the Redding demonstration in February calling for the recall of Shasta County Supervisor Kevin Klei.
(Ricci Pedroncelli/Associated Press)
Last spring, after Dominion’s vote, residents in Krei’s district launched a recall effort. This came just months after he took office after winning an election by 90 votes. Organizers said they were outraged by his decision to overturn the voting system and his consideration of appointing a California secessionist leader as county executive.
“He never told us he was going to do all this,” said recall effort leader and former public defender Jeff Gorder. “In our view, he lied about what he was going to do and began pursuing this extremist agenda.”
Cryi Inc. did not respond to a request for comment. But he spoke about the recall on a radio show last month, saying the attacks against him were painful. He called those behind the recall “blatant liars.”
Supervisor Kjällström is a director of the local chamber of commerce and will be in 2022. His campaign platform includes the desire to “return ‘punishment’ to crime and punishment,” and he continues to serve on the board as a member of the ultra-conservative group. He wasn’t going to be re-elected, No comment could be obtained.
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