Shasta County voters have ousted from office a key figure in the county's far-right shift, even as the fate of a second far-right crusader on the powerful Board of Supervisors still hangs in the balance.
Patrick Jones, former president of the five-member board, was soundly defeated in the Super Tuesday election, according to results released by the county recorder Friday afternoon. With 98% of the votes counted, Jones' opponent, Matt Plummer, a nonprofit consultant, was winning outright with nearly 60% of the vote.
It marked a surprising turn for Jones, a gun store manager who in his single term has become a leading voice in an ultraconservative insurgency that transformed this largely rural Northern California county into a national example of far-right government and electoral denial. .
In recent months, Jones led the charge charged with conspiracy to get rid of Dominion voting machines and have the county recount its votes manually. He helped push a county resolution pledging loyalty to the Second Amendment and a measure to allow concealed weapons in local government buildings, defying state law.
More broadly, he worked with militia members and secessionists on campaign efforts that dramatically reformed governance in a county long governed by traditional Republicans.
In another closely watched primary election, Jones's political ally, Supervisor Kevin Crye, survived a recall election by just 46 votes. Crye made headlines last year when he enlisted the support of Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow and a pro-Trump election denier, to reject Dominion machines.
Meanwhile, Allen Long, a retired Redding police lieutenant and relatively moderate, was the favorite in a race to fill a vacant board seat representing western Shasta County. In a four-way race, Long won 50.3% of the vote Friday and narrowly avoided a runoff.
During the election campaign, Long said, many voters shared their horror at what they heard at supervisor meetings and felt “a desperation for change.” She said the county government should focus on issues such as homelessness and making local communities safer from bushfires.
“I was watching the politics here in our county and I thought, 'Wow, this has really gotten extreme,'” he said. “I wanted to guide us back to the middle.”
In a distant second place, with 19% of the vote, was Laura Hobbs, who said in her candidacy statement that she is a stay-at-home mom who is “100% MAGA and America First.” She recently accused incumbent Supervisor Mary Rickert, a moderate Republican who regularly opposes Jones and Crye, of worshiping Satan because her license plate has the number “666.”
In his own reelection bid, Rickert led with 40.4% of the vote, but appears headed for a runoff against quarry owner Corkey Harmon. Win Carpenter, a prominent far-right voice in the Jefferson State secessionist movement, was in third place.
Taken together, the election results could indicate a shift toward the political center in Shasta County, or at least a desire for local government more focused on day-to-day life and operations.
“The last few years have been exhausting. And difficult,” said Jenny O’Connell, a Redding resident who voted in favor of Crye’s recall. “People say, 'I just need this to end. I just need sanity and normality.'”
“Part of the problem with dealing with constant craziness,” he added, “is that after a while you forget how crazy it is.”
Even if Crye survives the ouster, the loss of Jones is expected to disrupt leadership on the board, where the ultra-conservatives currently hold a 3-2 majority.
Shasta County Supervisor Patrick Jones, shown here at his family's gun store in Redding, has helped spearhead a far-right shift in local governance.
(Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times)
In an interview Friday, Jones took his loss in stride. He has about nine months left in his current term and said the Conservative bloc still has time to carry out its agenda.
“I'm very happy,” he said. “We did a lot of things last year. “This year we still have the whole year to continue with our policies.”
The registrar's office said there were still 1,208 unprocessed ballots, including some that were damaged and others that needed further review.
As votes were being counted, questions arose about Jones' connection to a controversial radio ad, broadcast a week before the election, that claimed a large number of incorrect ballots had been mailed to residents, including some for people dead The ad, broadcast on news station KQMS, provided listeners with a phone number to call if they received election materials that did not belong to them.
The county administrative office quickly issued a statement saying the ad had not been approved by election officials or the Board of Supervisors and that the phone number provided was registered to a private citizen.
In a published article, KQMS said Jones and Bev Gray, Jones' appointee to a newly created citizens' election commission, were responsible for the announcement. Jones said Gray wrote the ad but he took her to the radio station to show her how to record it. The radio station said an invoice showed it was billed to Jones Fort, his family's gun store in Redding.
Jones dismissed concerns about the ad's appropriateness and accused his opponents of “trying to make something out of nothing.”
The Shasta County District Attorney's Office said in a statement that the incident had been referred to them for investigation, but did not offer details.
Jones told The Times that Dist. Attorney. Stephanie Bridgett, “to try to intimidate him,” sent two detectives to the radio station. “Of course, that doesn't work and she should know better,” Jones said. “If she has that much time on her hands, we might want to take a look at her budget when June rolls around.”
Jones, former Redding mayor, was the first far-right figure elected to the board, as conservative backlash over COVID-19 lockdowns, masks and vaccines coalesced with anger over President Trump's loss in the elections. 2020 election. (Shasta County overwhelmingly supported his re-election bid.)
Jones' introductory meeting was on January 5, 2021, the day before the deadly siege of the US Capitol. Jones showed up to what was supposed to be a virtual meeting, opened the supervisor chambers and let an angry crowd into the county building.
Residents arrived in droves, unmasked, and some threatened supervisors for their alleged government tyranny. “When the ballot boxes disappear, all that remains is the box of cartridges,” one audience member growled. “You have made bullets more expensive. But lucky for you, the ropes are reusable.”
In early 2022, ultraconservatives, funded by Reverge Anselmo, a former Hollywood filmmaker who left the county after a land dispute, shocked the state's political establishment by pushing for the successful recall of Supervisor Leonard Moty, a former Republican police chief. , in part because it complied with state coronavirus mandates.
Crye, the current board president, and Supervisor Chris Kelstrom were elected to the board that same year.
Shasta County Supervisor Kevin Crye poses for a photo on the Sundial Bridge in Redding.
(Rico Pedroncelli / AP)
For the local vector control board, the majority named a right-wing political activist who warned about using mosquitoes 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 then there were the voting machines.
Last year, the Board of Supervisors upended the county's election process, canceling its contract with Dominion Voting Systems over unfounded allegations of voter fraud fueled by Trump. Supervisors opted to manually recount ballots from the county's more than 112,000 registered voters, making Shasta the largest government entity in the United States to employ manual recounting. Voting rights organizations were horrified. In October, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law, which Jones vowed to challenge, that limited counties from manually counting votes.
For years, Jones directed his ire at veteran registrar Cathy Darling Allen, the only Democrat elected to countywide office, publicly accusing her of lying about voting machines.
Election staff have been harassed, and during the June 2022 election, someone hung a trail camera (the kind hunters use to track wildlife) in the alley behind the recorder's office. Darling Allen, 55, recently announced that she will retire this spring because she was diagnosed with heart failure and she needs to reduce her stress level.
Jones' opponent, Plummer, told the Times that he had knocked on nearly 9,000 doors during his campaign and that people did not want to talk about partisan politics but preferred to discuss issues integral to their daily lives such as crime and roads.
“We decouple politics from those everyday issues, because so much of politics has become rhetoric and ideology rather than core issues,” Plummer said.
Many residents have grown tired of the drama.
John Deaton joins a February rally in Redding calling for the recall of Shasta County Supervisor Kevin Crye.
(Rico Pedroncelli / AP)
Last spring, after the Dominion vote, residents of Crye's district launched a recall, just months after he took office in an election he won by 90 votes. Organizers said they were angered by his decision to radically change the voting system, as well as exploring the idea of hiring a California secessionist leader as county chief executive.
“He hadn't told us he was going to do all these things,” said retired public defender Jeff Gorder, leader of the recall effort. “In our opinion, he lied about what he was going to do and began pursuing this extremist agenda.”
Crye did not respond to requests for comment. But he did speak about his retirement on his radio show last month, saying the attacks on him had been painful. He called the people behind the recall “blatant liars.”
Supervisor Kelstrom, director of the local chamber of commerce whose 2022 The campaign platform included a desire to “return 'punishment' to crime and punishment,” and he remains on the board as an ultra-conservative member. He did not run for re-election and He could not be reached for comment.
