Shasta’s disputes span industrial decline, election administration and rural health
Shasta County voters backed Franklin D. Roosevelt by just over 72% in 1932. Nearly a century later, roughly two-thirds supported Donald Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024, according to The Guardian’s Oct. 25, 2026 examination. The Guardian called Shasta “the de facto Maga capital of California” and “a center of the US election denial movement.” It said voters took Trump’s political philosophy and ran with it, electing officials who promoted false claims about stolen elections and frequently clashed with the state.
The Guardian spent more than a year examining the county’s 20th-century political transformation through longtime residents, historians and political experts. Its account described a community that “dramatically veered right amid the collapse of its major industries” and became “a hotbed for radical conservative politics.” The report presented Shasta as a case study in the Democratic Party’s effort to regain rural, working-class voters it once relied upon, even as the party appeared on track to win back important congressional seats in the midterm election.
The Guardian said the area drew national attention during the Covid-19 pandemic “for its hostility to Covid restrictions.” In the years that followed, a journalist was assaulted while covering a meeting of local conservative groups, and a protester faced jail time for holding a sign calling for an elected official’s resignation during a public meeting.
Walker’s account of public investment and Democratic allegiance
A crucial election approached as the country remained desperate. Despite promises that economic conditions were improving, nearly a quarter of the United States was out of work as voters headed to the polls in 1932. The Guardian described the period as “the darkest time since the civil war.” In early 1931, a crowd of 200 men scuffled over a handful of temporary jobs moving back-breaking loads of granite in California, the Sacramento Bee reported.
The newspaper urged readers to find odd jobs to save fellow citizens from hunger and homelessness. People who had already lost shelter set up along the banks of the Sacramento River and, in some cases, came close to starvation, according to the Bee. Opportunities were scarcer and relief slower in remote rural communities farther north.
Shasta County stretches from the northernmost reaches of the Central Valley into the state’s dense forests. Founded in 1850 as hundreds of thousands of people flocked to California in search of gold, the region became a productive center for gold mining, with newcomers scouring creeks and boring through mountains. It was a place of opportunity and a soon-to-be railroad hub with jobs in copper mining, agriculture and timber.
The Depression brought further hardship. In one mountain town, jobless men were accused of setting a blaze so they could be hired to extinguish it. Desperate people returned to green hills that once yielded fortunes, hoping to find gold again. “Not getting rich, but I dug out $18.90 last month,” one young man told a reporter in 1931. “I eat, and that beats being jobless and hungry.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt promised hope and help. He traveled through 41 states during his 1932 campaign and made a point of visiting small towns and rural areas. When he stopped in Redding, the Shasta County seat, in September 1932, businesses closed and classes ended early so everyone could see the then-New York governor’s remarks from the rear of a train. A National Archives and Records Administration photograph shows Roosevelt speaking there with his daughter Anna.
“I am not making this trip a political one. I am making it to learn the conditions and needs of every section of the United States,” Roosevelt told a crowd of several thousand. He added: “We are not making this fight against the Republican party but against Republican leadership which has brought the country to its present condition.”
Roosevelt’s message resonated. Despite Republican insistence that the party would carry California, the state went what one newspaper called “Democratic and progressive with a vengeance.” Shasta reflected that result, with just over 72% of voters backing Roosevelt.
Roosevelt came to the White House with broad support. His first-term agenda helped build a coalition of labor unions, African Americans, the working class, liberal professionals and white southerners that became the backbone of his party. Mere months after he took office, the Civilian Conservation Corps established work camps in Shasta County. His administration put millions of Americans to work through programs such as the CCC, which enlisted jobless young men to build campgrounds, cut firelines and construct fire lookouts.
The agencies Roosevelt created worked in virtually every U.S. county, brought power to vast swaths of the country and established much of the local infrastructure now known. Redding, the largest city in the area, received federal money for a fire station, post office, bridge and veterans memorial building. “That won over the hearts of millions of ordinary people,” said Richard Walker, a UC Berkeley professor emeritus and director of the Living New Deal research project. “They felt that the government cared. Critically, they felt they participated. They were helping their own community, whether it was fixing streets and sidewalks or planting trees or building schools.”
The Shasta Dam remains a physical measure of that era. The 600-foot structure was built with 15 million tons of concrete and has a reservoir capable of holding 4.5 million acre-feet of water. It has helped make California an agricultural powerhouse as the keystone of the Central Valley Project, sending water from northern California to more arid sections of the Central Valley for farming and generating enough electricity for as many as 710,000 homes. A tour guide said the federal government, which manages the dam, considers it critical infrastructure at a level just below the White House and Pentagon. Construction during the Depression and through the Second World War provided thousands of badly needed jobs.
Walker called the dam the county’s most significant investment of the era, one of the largest public-works projects of its time and one of the world’s most important hydroelectric facilities at the time. Most of California’s water is in the north, while 80% of demand is in the central and southern parts of the state. For decades, California had sought a solution to the imbalance and the winter flooding of valley communities. The state could not finance the project during the Depression, but prominent Californians, including Francis Carr, lobbied Roosevelt’s administration, which funded it.
State senator John B. McColl said in 1937 before construction began: “Things are more optimistic than ever before in [the] Central Valley. We are delighted with prospects of immediate work.” Construction employed almost 5,000 people at one time and brought new residents. Work continued 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Because the project was considered so vital, some workers received draft deferments during the Second World War. A photograph from around 1940 shows workers at the dam construction site.
Bob Mulholland, a veteran Democratic strategist and longtime Northern California resident, attributed enduring Democratic loyalty to the project. “I think there was a certain amount of that commitment or thanks for years, from the workers themselves and the kids, to FDR and the Democrats,” Mulholland said in a 2025 interview shortly before his death.
Inside 82-year-old Pat Carr’s packed home office in Cottonwood, not far from the Sacramento River, he has assembled a museum of a mostly forgotten political history. Old photographs of local figures with Democratic presidents hang beside letters from White House officials and a Supreme Court justice. The documents portray what The Guardian described as a deep-blue region built by Democratic policies. Carr recalled: “When I try to explain that to people here now, they’re going, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. It couldn’t have been like that’.” He added, “Those of us that remember a heyday, we’re almost all dead.”
Shasta residents played prominent roles in state and federal politics during the 20th century. They chaired the California Democratic Party, helped bring major infrastructure projects to the region and served in John F. Kennedy’s administration. Carr’s grandfather Francis appears in a photograph of Roosevelt’s Redding visit. Carr’s father and cousin managed Kennedy’s Northern California campaign, while his uncle, James Kennedy Carr, became undersecretary of the Department of the Interior. Pat Carr recalled: “The money was flowing out of Washington into the north state, and the guys that were getting it done were all Democrats.”
Postwar growth and changing Democratic coalitions
The Second World War and surging demand for housing in the years that followed brought significant growth to the timber industry. The Guardian described the period as an era of opportunity and expansion in Shasta, with ample jobs in mills and unions for a wide swath of workers, from loggers to retail clerks to bartenders. The local period “echoed what was happening across the US.”
Historian Harvey Kaye, a professor emeritus of democracy and justice at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, described the broader national period: “After the war, the United States experienced the greatest economic boom in human history and moreover, even as inequality was declining, the rich were still getting richer.” He added, “Everyone was doing better.”
By 1948, when Diane Kinyon was born, Shasta was one of California’s bluest counties and an important part of its Democratic base. Kinyon’s family had migrated to the area in the 1860s and worked for generations in the industries that helped build and feed California, from the railroad to ranching and logging. Her parents were “diehard Democrats,” she said. Her father was a union member who started as a mechanic, advanced at the county road department and operated a pizza shop with her mother. Her father emphasized the importance of unions to Kinyon, who later spent decades as a union organizer. “We knew we was union. We knew we were Democrats, and we knew what that meant was that you help people,” she said. “But I think on the other side, [those were Republican] values too. They just financially had a different way to get there.”
In the 1960s, construction of Interstate 5, the nearly 1,400-mile, or about 2,253-kilometer, highway running from Mexico to Canada, opened up the county and brought more tourists, Kinyon recalled. Road work and reservoir projects offered additional jobs.
The region’s extractive industries created lasting pollution. Mining damaged crops, seeped into waterways and poisoned fish. A sense of hope hung over the region, along with near-constant smoke from wood-waste burners at local mills, Pat Carr and his brother Jeff, a farmer and retired teacher, recalled. It was a sweet wood smell rather than the acrid wildfire smoke California frequently endures today. A 1930 photograph shows loggers moving timber with horses and “big wheel” wagons near Mount Shasta, with a “donkey” steam engine in the background.
The timber industry was in full swing in 1960 when John F. Kennedy ran for president and Shasta remained a Democratic powerhouse. One of the Carr brothers said Kennedy visited the area twice, following the same trail as Harry Truman in 1948. Speaking in Redding in 1960, Kennedy praised the Shasta Dam and told the crowd, “water is key to the American future” and “this valley shows what can be done.” Shasta recorded some of California’s highest support for Kennedy.
The Carr brothers’ uncle, James Kennedy Carr, joined the Kennedy administration as undersecretary of the Department of the Interior. A 1962 photograph of President Kennedy with James Kennedy Carr bears the inscription “JFK and JKC — Two fine ones!” and was signed by then Interior Secretary Stewart Udall.
The national Democratic coalition was changing at the same time. The civil rights movement and the party’s support for landmark legislation resulted in many white southerners beginning to abandon the party. Lyndon Johnson was the last Democratic presidential candidate to attract support from a majority of white Americans. Kaye described what conservatives and the corporate elite did as “a class war and crusade against the achievements of the ‘long age of Roosevelt’.”
Business groups touted “free enterprise” in an effort to disempower unions and reduce government regulation, while corporations moved operations to the U.S. South and abroad to cut costs and skirt regulations, Kaye argued. Jimmy Carter embraced deregulation and austerity measures, Kaye said, and his policies ultimately weakened unions. “The Democratic party basically turned its back on the working class,” Kaye said. “Republicans benefited from the Democrats abandoning the FDR tradition and the age of Roosevelt that had made them the majority party of the people from the early 1930s right through the early 70s.”
Industrial decline and party change in Shasta
Shasta remained reliably Democratic for a little longer, but mills had begun closing. Wood products had been among the country’s leading manufactured goods for decades, and far northern California was a key production hub. Industry groups argued that increased regulation and environmental laws were hamstringing the sector. Walker countered that by the late 70s the region had cut much of its prime timber and was being outcompeted by new technology and production in Canada and the southern United States.
Jeff Carr, 66, was a teenager when the closures began. Some young people entered the military or left town for college rather than work in the mills. “Shasta was founded on extractive industries,” Jeff Carr said, adding that the county appeared to have largely used them up.
In November 1980, after nearly 50 years of almost uninterrupted Democratic support, Shasta County backed Ronald Reagan. Voters also ousted the area’s long-serving congressman, Bizz Johnson, in favor of a Republican. Jeff Carr called the change a seismic shift that echoed a transformation taking place across California. In 1986, Democratic consultant Michael Berman told the Los Angeles Times: “There’s one story here: California has gone to hell for Democrats. Young people are registering Republican. And from what they’ve had to choose – between Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale or Ronald Reagan – it’s not been a tough choice.”
The trend later reversed in much of California but endured in interior counties such as Shasta, where some voters shifted Republican and remained aligned with the party. A surge of new residents arrived from Southern California, drawn by the relative affordability of Northern California and more conservative in their politics. Churches expanded, including ultra-conservative worship houses, and Simpson University, an evangelical college, moved to Redding in 1989.
Shasta became more solidly conservative as the influx increased property values and costs while the mills continued to decline. Democratic organizer and lifelong resident Frank Treadway, 84, said: “None of us really saw that coming. I chalk it up to being complacent, being overly self-assured.” At his coffee and tea shop, Treadway saw newly arrived conservatives make a point of loudly discussing religion and politics because they knew he was active in the Democratic Party.
Jeff Carr heard conservative talk radio become a constant soundtrack on ranches and job sites. He said the combination of religious fervor and politics made disagreements increasingly personal: “With that fusion of religious fervor, it made politics extremely personal and a part of people’s fabric,” Carr said. “That’s when we began to see it: a real divide and the inability to meet on common-ground issues.”
The Guardian wrote: “A battle over wildlife highlighted the disintegration of this common ground.” Even decades on, some Shasta residents shuddered at mention of the spotted owl. Kinyon said, “The spotted owl screwed us.”
Timber was already declining steeply when the federal government listed the northern spotted owl, which relies on old-growth and mature forests for nesting, as a threatened species. The protection significantly restricted logging. Walker said the industry pushed a self-serving narrative by pinning the decline on environmentalists who wanted to protect the small percentage of old-growth trees that remained. The listing came during Republican George H. W. Bush’s administration after lawsuits, but the Democratic Party largely supported the proposal.
The Guardian said the decision became a source of years of resentment and further diminished the party’s popularity in the area. Kinyon said: “Not everybody is with me on the spotted owl situation. As a Democrat I thought: we’re making a mistake.”
By the end of the century, California had become a strongly and securely Democratic state, while Shasta hardly resembled the community visited by Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy decades earlier. Its population had exploded, but its Democratic base had collapsed. Walker called the transformation emblematic of rural America, where the loss of key industries drove economic decline. He said these communities needed something akin to the New Deal, government intervention and investment to remain viable, along with improved schools that would help students compete in changing labor markets. He said the support never came from either Democratic or Republican administrations. “The government stopped caring. You’ve got very little government aid to workers whose factories were closing, whose lumber mills were closing, whose mines were closing. The basic foundation of their lives were shrinking,” Walker said.
Political change before and during the Trump era
On a sweltering afternoon in June 2016, Republican candidate Donald Trump stood before a crowd of thousands of supporters in Redding and promised a transformation. “We are going to bring jobs back to this country. We need our jobs. We’re going to make it very expensive for companies to fire everybody and leave,” he said in front of a plane adorned with his name at the Redding airport. “You know, your area has lost one in three manufacturing jobs over a fairly short period of time. That’s a lot of manufacturing jobs.”
Shasta, a county of about 180,000 people and one of California’s most conservative counties, gave Trump more than 64% of its vote in 2016 and 65% in 2020. The Guardian reported that Trump’s words brought hope to the county. It said Trump delivered change there, but not the kind he had promised. The Guardian wrote that his refusal to admit he lost the 2020 presidential contest, coupled with the pandemic, “ushered in an era of political extremism that reshaped public life in this region.”
The Guardian reported that the latest shift began even before the election, amid “a swell of outrage over California’s covid restrictions.” It described growing discontent across the United States during the pandemic, visible in unruly school board meetings and city council sessions, but said the unrest was particularly severe in Shasta.
Some residents viewed the state’s strict rules as missteps and overreach, and as further evidence that California’s Democratic leaders were out of touch with rural communities. The Guardian reported that the restrictions reinforced a feeling that had been building for decades — “that the region had been forgotten by Sacramento.” Many residents were also aggrieved by what they saw as a sudden and lengthy intrusion into daily life.
The Guardian said photographs of the governor attending a dinner party at the upscale French Laundry while the state urged people to avoid such gatherings fueled “further outrage.” It reported that frustration over the pandemic and the state’s Democratic supermajority in the Capitol intensified anger at the government and deepened allegiance to Trump. In Shasta, that frustration also brought together disaffected residents and broad political groups, including militia members, anti-vaccination advocates and secessionists.
Connecticut heir Reverge Anselmo, who had a years-long grudge against the county government, poured money into the growing anti-establishment movement. He also backed an effort to recall moderate Republican supervisors accused of not doing enough to challenge state pandemic rules.
Leonard Moty, a former police chief who had served on the county board for years, suddenly found himself not conservative enough for the political moment. Trent Copland, a retired teacher whose family settled in the county in the 1860s, was friends with Moty and considered him a reasonable Republican despite their clashing political beliefs. When Moty faced the recall election, Copland rushed to help. Moty lost his seat, and the recall handed control of the county governing body to a deeply conservative majority aligned with the anti-establishment movement. The Guardian characterized the outcome as setting off “years of dysfunction.”
Election administration and local political conflict
The Guardian wrote that during the following five years, local politics would be “defined by animosity,” with Democrats and moderate Republicans pitted against “ultra conservatives.” It reported that public meetings had seen “little meaningful conversation” and instead produced verbal sparring and arrests.
Jenny O’Connell Nowain, a former preschool teacher with no criminal history, was detained and charged after silently protesting an official who had alleged without evidence that elections in the community were being manipulated. The Guardian said a recent visitor could come away with the impression that fraudulent elections were the most pressing local issue. “Now the big deal is election fraud, and there’s not a shred of proof that election fraud has ever taken place,” Copland said. “But that doesn’t seem to matter. The facts don’t matter.”
A small but visible group of local residents insisted that local races were compromised. Some elected officials supported those claims, arguing without evidence that there had been widespread interference in local contests. They unsuccessfully sought to implement a hand-count system, a method considered too costly and error-prone for complex U.S. elections but embraced by those who mistrust the integrity of the country’s voting.
The Guardian described the small settlement of Cottonwood as perhaps best known for its rugged western beauty, nearby fish hatchery and right-wing militia. The settlement has wide-open spaces, sprawling cattle ranches and views of the junction of the Sierra Nevada and Cascades. The Guardian reported that, even in a deeply Republican county, the community stood apart for its conservatism.
Old signs for Measure B remain along roads beneath majestic oaks. Voters approved Measure B in June, a controversial ballot initiative that would end nearly all voting by mail while requiring voter identification and a hand count. A judge blocked the measure from taking effect as the litigation proceeded, placing the county in another legal dispute with California.
A photograph identifies barbershop owner Woody Clendenen as the founder of the Cottonwood Militia and shows him shaving customer Ben Duncan. Clendenen displays Trump 2020 and MAGA hats alongside shotgun and rodeo posters and references to the U.S. Constitution.
Separately, a sign supporting Prop 39, a statewide ballot measure that would require voters to show identification, stood in a Shasta County front yard. Californians were scheduled to vote on the measure on Nov. 3. The previous year, Shasta County appointed Clint Curtis, a self-described election-integrity advocate with no relevant experience, to oversee its voting. Curtis accused his predecessors of interfering with elections even though Republicans consistently won the county, and he recently announced plans to hire a disgraced election clerk from Colorado.
The Guardian reported that longtime residents, including Kinyon, were frustrated by the significant time and resources officials had invested in trying to solve an election problem that did not exist while the area faced significant challenges.
Rural health, federal funding and economic strain
The Guardian reported that Shasta County had one of California’s highest suicide rates, along with high overdose rates, while residents described a severe lack of economic opportunity. Bethel, a conservative megachurch with about 11,000 members, plays a significant role in the local economy. Its school of supernatural ministry, which has been called a “Christian Hogwarts,” has attracted thousands of students and visitors, some of whom have stayed and started businesses.
The area relies heavily on federal funding, but primarily through grants and social services rather than the large infrastructure projects that once employed thousands. Rural California was expected to take a significant hit from the Trump administration’s cuts to those grants and services, including about $1 trillion from Medicaid over 10 years.
The previous year, the head of Shasta’s largest health care provider warned that the changes to Medicaid would have “crippling” impacts in a county where the local Medicaid provider serves nearly one-third of the population. The full effects of the budget reductions would take time to appear but would have repercussions in the region for years. Experts warned that a new $50 billion fund allocating money for rural health was too small to offset the adverse effects. Democrats said they would reverse the cuts if they won the midterms.
Local Democrats seek more organizing as Walker calls for investment
A redistricting effort undertaken in response to Trump’s push for gerrymandering in Texas left the region poised to have its first Democratic representative in Congress in nearly 50 years. The measure, called Prop 50, fueled resentment among conservatives against California Gov. Gavin Newsom and intensified feelings that rural areas were not receiving fair representation. Just over 70% of Shasta voters opposed it. Other residents welcomed the prospect of a more experienced congressman.
“I believe one of the best advocates that the North State will have gained is Jared Huffman,” Jeff Carr said, referring to the lawmaker slated to represent the region in January. He pointed to Huffman’s role as the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee and his advocacy for farmers.
Local Democrats hoped the party would devote more resources to organizing in Shasta instead of treating the county as a place where losses must be minimized. “We as Democrats [have looked] at Shasta county as a place where we gotta reduce our losses, not as a place we can win,” Mulholland said the previous year.
The California Democratic Party concentrates resources in close races, meaning conservative rural areas receive relatively little support. Kinyon had long believed that if the state party invested more in local races, Democrats in the county could rally more voters. “Our votes are important. Our people are. Give us some help,” she said.
In the meantime, local Democrats have focused on community building and advocacy through food and clothing drives and support groups for immigrants, work that reflected the emphasis Kinyon recalled from childhood. “I think we’re making meaningful progress in Shasta county in the ways that we find people need help,” Kinyon said. “Those are the things that we work on here.”
Jeff Carr serves with Kinyon on the local Democratic central committee and said the party was trying to help people at risk of losing food, health and housing benefits under recent federal reductions. Francie Sullivan, one of the few Democrats ever to serve on Shasta’s governing board, said greater state-party support would not immediately change election results but could improve political discussion.
Walker said the region needed massive investment to create thriving communities. He noted that Joe Biden’s administration backed some significant rural projects but said Democrats communicated poorly about them. “People in the rural areas like Shasta county have no idea what Biden was trying to do for them … They don’t think the government helps them,” Walker said. “There’s a lot of money that flows into Shasta county from the richer areas, but nobody trumpets it. They need more, and they don’t get it. And I understand their despair.”
Walker added: “If we don’t get a new New Deal of some kind it’ll continue. The rural areas will continue to wallow in the mire of Magaism, and we’re going to be stuck with this horrible government. It’s a tragedy. It’s just a long, slow tragedy.”
Back in Pat Carr’s office, he and Jeff considered what might turn the region around. Residents had previously lobbied the state to open a new university campus in Shasta, which Jeff Carr said could have a tremendous impact. The region needed a change of perspective and a long-term economic vision, he said. A portrait shows the Carr brothers together, while a filing cabinet in Pat’s home is covered with name badges, newspaper clippings and political stickers.
Pat and Jeff Carr were not leaving. “There are other places that I could be that would be easier and the like. It’s well beyond family loyalty,” Pat Carr said from his property in Cottonwood, as the sun shone brightly over Lassen Peak framed in the window behind him. “I feel a duty almost to be here.”