Shasta County voters have fired a key figure in the district’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 chairman of the five-member board, was badly defeated in the Super Tuesday elections, according to results released by the county clerk’s office Friday afternoon. With 98% of the votes counted, Jones’ opponent, Matt Plummer, a nonprofit consultant, won outright with nearly 60% of the vote.

It marked a stunning turn for Jones, a gun store manager who in his sole term has emerged as a leading voice in an ultraconservative insurgency that has transformed this largely rural Northern California county into a national example of hard-right governance and election denial. .

In recent months, Jones led the conspiracy-laden charge to ditch Dominion voting machines and return the county to voting by hand. He helped push through a county resolution pledging allegiance to the Second Amendment and a measure to allow concealed weapons in local government buildings, contrary to state law.

More broadly, he worked with militia members and secessionists on campaign efforts that dramatically reformed governance in a county long governed by mainstream Republicans.

In another closely watched primary, Jones’ political ally, Supervisor Kevin Crye, survived a recall election by just 46 votes. Crye made headlines last year when he expressed support for nixing Dominion machines from Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow and pro-Trump election denier.

Meanwhile, Allen Long, a retired Redding police lieutenant and relative moderate, was the front-runner in a race to fill an open board seat representing western Shasta County. In a four-way race, Long had 50.3% of the vote on Friday and narrowly avoided a runoff.

During the campaign, Long said, many voters shared his disgust at what they heard at supervisors’ meetings and felt “a desperation for change.” The provincial government, he said, should focus on issues like homelessness and making local communities safer from wildfires.

“I was looking at the politics here in our province and I thought, ‘Wow, this has gotten really extreme,’” he said. “I wanted to lead us back to the center.”

In a distant second place, with 19% of the vote, was Laura Hobbs, who said in her candidate 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 frequently opposes Jones and Crye, of worshiping Satan because her license plate reads “666.”

In her own re-election bid, Rickert led with 40.4% of the vote, but appears to be heading for a runoff against quarry owner Corkey Harmon. Win Carpenter, a prominent far-right voice in the Jefferson State secessionist movement, came in third.

Overall, the election results could indicate a shift toward the political center in Shasta County, or at least a desire for local government that focuses more on daily life and activities.

“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 want this to stop. I just need sanity and normalcy.'”

“Part of the problem with dealing with constant madness,” she added, “is that after a while you forget how crazy it is.”

Even if Crye survives the recall, Jones’ loss is expected to upend the leadership of the board, where ultraconservatives currently hold a 3-2 majority.

In an interview Friday, Jones took his loss seriously. He has about nine months left in his current term and said the conservative bloc still has time to implement its agenda.

“I’m really happy,” he said. “We did a lot last year. This year we still have all year to continue with our policy.”

According to the election office, 1,208 ballots still had not been processed, including some that are damaged and others that require further review.

As votes were being counted, questions arose about Jones’ connection to a controversial radio ad, which aired a week before the election, claiming that a large number of incorrect ballots, including some for dead people, had been 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 did not belong to them.

The county executive quickly released a statement saying the ad had not been approved by election officials or the Board of Supervisors and that the phone number provided was in the name of a private citizen.

In a reported story, KQMS said Jones and Bev Gray Jones’ appointee to a newly formed citizen elections commission were responsible for the ad. Jones said Gray had written the ad, but he took her to the radio station to show her how to shoot the ad. The station said an invoice showed it was billed to Jones Fort, his family’s gun shop in Redding.

Jones dismissed concerns about the ad’s accuracy 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 provide details.

Jones told The Times that Dist. Atty. Stephanie Bridgett, “to try to intimidate him”, sent two detectives to the radio station. “Of course that kind of thing 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 in June.”

Jones, a former mayor of Redding, was the first far-right figure elected to the administration, as conservative reactions to COVID-19-related lockdowns, masks and vaccines merged with anger over President Trump losing the 2020 election . (Shasta County overwhelmingly supported his re-election bid.)

Jones’ introductory meeting was on January 5, 2021, the day before the deadly siege on the U.S. Capitol. Jones showed up to what was supposed to be a virtual meeting, unlocked the supervisors’ rooms and allowed an angry crowd into the county building.

Residents poured in, unmasking and threatening some regulators for their alleged government tyranny. When the ballot box is gone, all that’s left is the cartridge box,” an onlooker snapped. ‘You have made bullets expensive. But luckily for you, 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 forcing the successful recall of Supervisor Leonard Moty, a Republican former police chief, in part because he complied with state rules. mandates due to the coronavirus.

Crye, the current board chairman, and Supervisor Chris Kelstrom were elected to the board later that year.

For the local vector control council, the council majority appointed a right-wing political activist who warned against using mosquitoes as ‘flying syringes’ for mass vaccination. And they named an outspoken critic of COVID-19 vaccine mandates as the province’s new health officer.

And then there were the voting machines.

Last year, the Board of Supervisors upended the county’s election process by terminating its contract with Dominion Voting Systems over Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud. Supervisors opted to manually count ballots for the county’s more than 112,000 registered voters, making Shasta the largest government agency in the U.S. to use hand counts. Voters’ rights groups were stunned. In October, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law in which Jones pledged to challenge counties’ restrictions on hand-counting votes.

For years, Jones focused his ire on Cathy Darling Allen, the only Democrat elected in the entire district, publicly accusing her of lying about voting machines.

Election staffers have been harassed, and during a June 2022 election, someone rigged up a trail camera that hunters use to track wildlife in the alley behind the registration office. Darling Allen, 55, recently announced that she will retire this spring because she has been diagnosed with heart failure and her stress levels need to be reduced.

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 party politics, preferring to discuss issues integral to their daily lives, such as crime and roads.

“We’ve disconnected politics from everyday issues because a lot of politics is about rhetoric and ideology rather than the core issues,” Plummer said.

Many residents have grown tired of the drama.

Last spring, after the Dominion vote, residents of Cryes’ district launched a recall campaign just months after he took office in an election he won by 90 votes. Organizers said they were angry about his decision to upend the voting system, as well as his investigation into the idea of ​​hiring a California separatist leader as the county’s CEO.

He didn’t tell us he was going to do any of these things, said retired public defender Jeff Gorder, a leader of the recall effort. In our opinion, he lied about what he was going to do and started pursuing this extremist agenda.

Crye did not respond to requests for comment. But he did address the recall on his radio show last month, saying the attacks on him were painful. He called the people behind the recall outright liars.

Supervisor Kelstrom, director of a local chamber of commerce whose 2022 campaign platform included a desire to return punishment to crime and punishment, remains on the board as an ultra-conservative member. He was not eligible for re-election could not be reached for comment.