California’s Red Counties

Throughout Northern California, a swath of conservative, sparsely populated counties have headed in a dramatically different direction politically in recent years to the rest of the state. Nowhere is this more clear than in Shasta County, home of the magnificent Shasta Mountain, as well as 179,000 residents, and a mecca to mountaineers and hikers from around the world. In November 2020, while two-thirds of California voters chose Biden over Trump, in Shasta those numbers were reversed. Nearly 63 percent of local voters supported the coup plotting MAGA man.

Shasta, along with roughly a dozen other northern and eastern counties in the state, has a dismal Covid vaccination rate—just over 50 percent have received one dose of the vaccine, but significantly under half the population has received two or more doses—and a political environment increasingly fractured around the issue of mask mandates, public health restrictions, and vaccine requirements. The low vaccination rates have, especially during the Omicron surge, translated to high rates of infection, hospitalization, and death. At the same time, conservative residents have grown increasingly hostile to any and all public health measures intended to rein in the pandemic.

Last year, a recall effort was launched against three members of the county’s board of supervisors, whom activists deemed weren’t conservative enough, especially when it came to pandemic policies. One of the three campaigns, against supervisor Leonard Moty, got enough signatures to qualify for the ballot—Moty says that his well-financed opponents targeted him, in particular, on the assumption that once he fell, the county government would immediately tilt toward the alt right. The recall election was set for this past Tuesday, February 1.

Moty is a Republican, and the former police chief in the town of Redding; but, despite these credentials, he and two of his colleagues, Joe Chimenti and Mary Rickert, were targeted for recall by conservatives after they voted to censor the other two county supervisors, Les Baugh and Patrick Jones, for letting the public into the board’s chambers on January 5 of 2021 in the face of a county-wide order banning in-person meetings. The three were also criticized by conservative opponents for not withdrawing the county from Governor Newsom’s color-tiered system, in place for more than a year, that set different levels of restrictions on businesses and on public gatherings depending on what the infection levels and test- positivity rates were in each county.

While not all of the votes have been tallied yet, early returns from Tuesday’s election strongly indicate that Moty will lose the recall. As of Wednesday evening, the no-on-recall side was trailing the yes-on-recallers by more than 5 percent, and the conservative activists were preparing to evict Moty, whom they deride as a RINO (Republican In Name Only), from his county office.

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