In one of California's Trumpiest counties, the MAGA backlash has begun

In a part of upstate California roiled by MAGA politics and dark suspicions about democratic institutions, it was what passed for an ordinary moment.

Shasta County Registrar of Voters Clint Curtis, completing a turbulent year in office and unhappy with the results of the recent primary he lost, wanted more money so his fractured department could begin printing ballots in-house.

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"Right now we have no idea where the ballots go, who mails them out or where they're going," Curtis said June 9, making three misstatements. (The ballots are currently printed by the county's chosen vendor, Runbeck Solutions; mailed by the U.S. Postal Service to voters registered with Curtis' office; then mailed back to his office or deposited in secure boxes.)

Shasta County Supervisor Kevin W. Crye, the far-right politician who helped author the rural county's political makeover, told his handpicked registrar to "keep up the good work."

The exchange occurred one week after voters in the ruggedly contrarian county decided they'd had enough of both men's work.

Earlier this month, voters decisively ousted Crye and Curtis, and sent Supervisor Chris Kellstrom to the general election trailing a moderate challenger. Even if Kellstrom wins in November, the results of the June 2 primary tilt the county's most powerful body back to the center-right - ending a five-year MAGA experiment and signaling trouble for President Donald Trump in one of California's Trumpiest strongholds.

"People have seen the result of a MAGA-led government, whether it's on a national level or a local level," said Mary Rickert, a lifelong Republican who served two terms on the Board of Supervisors before losing to a Trump-aligned challenger in 2024. "They are seeing the consequences of putting people in positions they are not qualified (for)."

Shasta County, known for its homegrown militias, dueling secessionists, influential megachurch and enduring devotion to Trump-style politics, is having another bellwether moment.

Well before the president hopscotched to his second term, MAGA political operators held up the north-state county as a template for what they could accomplish at the grassroots level. Bankrolled by special interests, a coalition of COVID lockdown opponents and 2020 election deniers elevated extremists to the Shasta County Board of Supervisors, then got to work on what they believed was an administrative deep state.

The new board fired or chased out the county's chief executive, public health officer, registrar of voters and a series of county counsels, replacing them with inexperienced or firebrand individuals who promised to find fraud and oppose California mandates. Scores of county employees left in the process.

"That tide has reversed with this latest election," observed Robb Korinke, a veteran political consultant who has been active in Shasta County politics since 2017.

But tides come and go. And, as this one recedes, the locals breathing a sigh of relief say they are still assessing the damage left behind.

"I don't think any of us know the depth of the destruction from the inside," said Arch Collaborative CEO Kimberly L. Johnson, whose Children's Legacy Center and One Safe Place nonprofits have worked alongside county officials to serve victims of child abuse and domestic violence.

‘Flabbergasting'

Johnson had spent a few years working with trafficking survivors and foster youth when she co-founded the Children's Legacy Center in 2016, one of the groups carrying out Arch's mission. In those early years, Johnson said Shasta County leaders served as her mentors and bureaucracy navigators, and gave her a front-row seat to small-town governance at its nimblest.

When federal and state guidelines required California counties to change their approach to child sexual exploitation a decade ago, for instance, Shasta County was the first to bring its protocols online, Johnson said, prompting requests from other counties.

"There's a real grief there because I remember what it was before," she said. "I know the best of who we are."

Johnson said her favorite example came during the pandemic, when the county superintendent of schools sent up a flare about students slipping through the remote-learning cracks. Within a week, Johnson's board - composed of the sheriff, district attorney, two police chiefs, and health and education leaders - devised a plan for checking in on at-risk students through informal grocery drop-offs and formal welfare checks. More than 40 students were diverted this way, according to an annual report from the time. "It was just this heroic moment, and we didn't have kids fall through the cracks during COVID," Johnson said.

But the COVID era also coincided with the county's hard-right pivot - the result, Korinke said, of "a perfect storm" of grassroots populism and hidden money. United by a shared opposition to lockdown protocols out of Sacramento, a coalition of militia members, secessionists, Main Street merchants, Moms for Liberty activists and others began barnstorming Board of Supervisors meetings and accusing the Republican majority of tyranny.

Behind the scenes, tribal leaders seeking to build a mega-casino, cannabis entrepreneurs eager to relax zoning laws and Reverge Anselmo, a Connecticut son of a satellite television billionaire with a yearslong grudge against the county, poured money into far-right candidates who were active in local secession or Tea Party movements.

A docuseries called "Red White and Blueprint" held up Shasta County as a model for electing MAGA candidates statewide.

"It's like we were Project 2025 starting in 2020," observed Rickert, who was eventually crushed by the MAGA wave.

Anselmo spent more than $1.6 million since 2020 to recall supervisors he didn't like and elect ones he did, in some cases using pass-through committees with forgettable names, such as the Water Users Committee. With his financial backing, the hard-liners successfully recalled Leonard Moty, a former Redding police chief vulnerable to attack because he had a sheriff escort behind the Carr Fire lines to hook up his generator, and elected Kelstrom and Crye in 2022.

Crye, who owns a talent agency and a "ninja" gym, quickly emerged as the board's combative "center of gravity," Korinke said.

"He is like the general of the army there," Korinke added. "He really captured the ‘eff you' zeitgeist of MAGA."

Crye did not respond to an interview request. He's been at the center of many of the board's most controversial or puzzling decisions, like devising an elections commission whose recommendations were deemed illegal by the county's top attorney, getting a secession activist hired as a health consultant after failing to install him as a county executive, and appointing Jan. 6 attendee and QAnon believer Jon Knight to the Mosquito and Vector Control board after Knight aired his suspicion that Bill Gates had genetically modified mosquitoes to mass-vaccinate the public.

But it was something else Crye manifested that Korinke and Rickert say shocked a public that had gotten used to the "Jerry Springer" vibes and junior-varsity kleptocracy.

In 2023, the Redding Rancheria, a Shasta County-based tribal government, was seeking a deal with the county to relocate and expand its Win-River Resort & Casino into a 1.1 million-square-foot gaming complex and nine-story hotel off of Interstate 5.

In exchange for 30 years of county services, the Redding Rancheria offered a one-time payment of $3.3 million and $50,000 annually, far less than other intergovernmental arrangements between tribes and local governments. Shasta County's sheriff, district attorney, outside counsel and other officials forcefully opposed the offer.

But Crye pushed the board into a 4-1 vote to approve it. A lawsuit alleged the board improperly overruled the interests of the public. Last year, a judge sided with the plaintiff, ruling the deal "illegal."

Rickert, the only supervisor to oppose it, said Crye and then-Supervisor Patrick Henry Jones worked behind the scenes to scuttle a better deal by pushing out Eric Magrini, the assistant county CEO working on it. Magrini, a former sheriff, has filed his own lawsuit alleging that he was wrongfully terminated and that Crye stalked his wife.

"The people of Shasta County, do you know how much money they lost?" said Rickert, who put the figure north of $200 million.

"It's a real ‘mask off' moment in the county," said Korinke, co-founder of Grassroots Lab, a political consulting firm based in Long Beach. "It was flabbergasting. … That's not fiscal conservatism."

Crye barely survived the ensuing recall attempt in March 2024, keeping his seat by 50 votes. He was aided by a $5,500 donation from the tribe, which has spent more than $20,000 on the supervisors who backed the agreement.

But Crye, whose frequent jousts with board meeting attendees have garnered him comparisons to the president, saw his iron grip loosen. When he tried to strip a moderate supervisor of committee appointments last summer, the swing vote that stymied him came from a member of his bloc.

Outside of a $50,000 loan to himself and a few four-figure checks from influential groups, neither the money nor the anger was behind Crye in this most recent election. He ended up spending only $3,600 on his reelection campaign, a tiny sum even for Shasta County.

This month, Erin Resner, a Redding City Council member and Dutch Bros. franchisor who came within 90 votes of defeating Crye in 2022, bested the incumbent by more than 1,400, carrying 54% of the electorate. Crye pulled 38%.

Resner raised less than Crye but did so through dozens more donations. And she spent most of it on getting her message out, that she's a "sensible" conservative who wants to see Shasta County escape its dysfunctional reputation and work with surrounding counties on the homelessness and mental health crises afflicting the region.

"This was a flag-in-the-ground moment," said Resner, who also defeated Richard Gallardo, a commercial truck driver who supported a local initiative to greatly restrict voting. "I think people are done with the charade and the chaos."

If, five years ago, there was a lightning-strike fusion of populist anger and moneyed interests, those ingredients weren't present in the recent election, Korinke and others said.

The new casino is reportedly underway, the local cannabis industry is de rigueur, the militias have gone to ground, and the docuseries makers have moved on. Even Anselmo and his millions have remained out of Shasta County. Only the voter fraud evangelists keep the fire going, pushing through a local ballot initiative that outlaws mail voting, institutes voter ID and requires election results to be fully hand-counted on the same day.

On Tuesday, supervisors decided they wouldn't defend Measure B against California's lawsuit accusing it of violating multiple state laws. In a statement, Curtis, who has yet to concede his own election, said he thought it "might be an error for the state to blatantly refuse to honor the will of the voters."

"Now what you've seen is a lot of these folks have achieved their aims," Korinke said. "To a large degree, they got what they wanted and now they're not doing anything, and now these guys are losing."

‘Carnage'

On a recent June afternoon, Rickert was preparing a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant application for her mom-and-pop slaughterhouse and feeling the ache of her 73 summers.

A majority owner of Prather Ranch, a cattle-raising and beef-harvesting operation that spans 34,000 acres across five Northern California counties, Rickert and her husband have been dipping into their savings to keep the ranch afloat amid skyrocketing insurance costs, surging gas prices and bounce-back inflation.

"You can't sell your beef for that much more," she lamented. "It's a real problem for ranchers and farmers."

And for some of the president's men.

Rickert, a gun-owning Catholic and Reagan Republican who was essentially primaried on the right when she lost her supervisor seat in 2024, said she's beginning to see signs that "the Trump presidency is losing its luster" in her dark-red county 200 miles north of San Francisco. Or, more precisely, she's seeing the lack of signs.

"Shasta County is still a Trump-loving county, no doubt about it, but you don't see as many Trump signs as you used to," she said. "You notice it."

Any slippage of visible support is occurring at a time that Trump's effect on the area grows more pronounced through his signature domestic legislation.

Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a fifth of Shasta County's CalFresh recipients, about 6,000 residents, are at risk of losing the supplemental food assistance due to a waiver ending for so-called able-bodied adults without dependents. Almost a third of the county's Medi-Cal population, 17,200 residents, could lose coverage due to new eligibility requirements, while another 5,700 beneficiaries will need to start requalifying twice a year if they want to keep their insurance, Health and Human Services Agency director Christy Coleman told supervisors June 11.

These changes are reaching into a county where the death rate is already 60% higher than the state's, according to the California Health Care Foundation. At least one of the causes is self-inflicted. Along with elevated rates of chronic disease, gun suicides and drug overdoses, Shasta County's political polarization has made it nearly impossible to recruit and retain qualified health professionals, the foundation reported this year.

The physician shortage prompted the county's public health officer to declare a public health crisis last year and has been chiseling away at the county health agency, where staff vacancies approached or surpassed 200 in each of the past five years.

Even after the county deleted more than 150 vacant positions in 2024, many of them unfilled for a year, Coleman said her agency is carrying more than 170 openings this year. "Hiring qualified applicants in critical areas continues to be one of our greatest challenges," she told supervisors.

A resident of McArthur, 80 miles north of the county seat, Rickert had intended to avoid local politics after losing her reelection bid to a Trump-aligned business owner who labeled her a fake Republican. She'd tired of the histrionics, she said, of MAGA supervisors' investigations that went nowhere, of the ugly tone at public meetings and the uglier one in closed session, of good people leaving and ideologues taking their place.

She wanted to spend more time with her grandchildren and cattle. But former constituents called her when her successor didn't respond to their emails, she said. And she said she advised the campaigns of Resner and former assistant registrar Joanna Francescut, who handily defeated Curtis.

"I want Shasta County to resume its reputation as a stable and stellar county," Rickert said. To do that, she believes a new generation of elected leaders needs to take a hard look at the recent past.

Under the MAGA board, the county's legal costs rose from $7 million or less in the three years before the 2022 takeover to a high of $26 million in 2023-2024 and $20.9 million last fiscal year, budget documents show.

"This corruption permeated the entire system," Rickert said. "There has to be some looking back at the decisions that were made."

Johnson, who endorsed Resner three days before the election, seconded the idea. Her Arch Collaborative has found little purchase with county leaders these days. Attempts to negotiate a county land transfer for a regional mental health campus went nowhere. She couldn't even eke out a letter of support to pursue a state grant for responding to elder abuse, she said.

Johnson said she isn't sure to what degree Shasta County residents connect their pocketbook struggles, longer wait times at the ER or even the mass departure of county prosecutors to local or even national politics. "I know we live in echo chambers," she said. "There's some people that are just trying to put gas in their cars and do their jobs. They don't understand the impact that this division has had, even on their own lives."

But, Johnson added, she knows who feels it first.

"We've definitely experienced the worst of local politics and the effect that has on vulnerable communities," she said. "The carnage that has been left in its wake … the truth is it's destabilized a region."

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This story was originally published June 21, 2026 at 10:32 AM.