From El Dorado Hills to Modesto: Voters should reject this Trump-loving candidate | Opinion
More than a million people in California’s 4th Senate District — including El Dorado Hills, South Lake Tahoe and Modesto — would be making a costly mistake by electing a Donald Trump-aligned firebrand with no governing experience over a candidate who has actually led.
Conservative Shasta County chose MAGA over competence and now, after years of bizarre partisan decisions, county voters in Redding and beyond are expressing their regrets at the ballot box.
That’s the danger for 4th District voters if they elect Republican Alexandra Duarte in November. She has no governing experience. The California Republican Party condemned her dangerous and divisive campaign tactics.
The warning signs are there. Voters in the 13 California counties within the 4th Senate District, including the communities of El Dorado, Placer, Stanislaus and Merced, need only look at what happened north of them to realize the stakes in this November’s election.
“People have seen the result of a MAGA-led government, whether it’s on a national level or a local level,” Mary Rickert told the San Francisco Chronicle. Rickert is a Republican who served two terms on the Shasta County Board of Supervisors before she lost to a far-right challenger in 2024.
“They are seeing the consequences of putting people in positions they are not qualified for,” Rickert said.
How bad has it been in Shasta County?
County supervisors canceled contracts with established voting systems on the basis of false claims by Trump. This month, Shasta County was sued by Attorney General Rob Bonta for approving a measure that would block most voting by mail, mandate hand counts of election ballots and require county residents to provide government-issued ID’s to register to vote.
Then they hired a Jan. 6 rioter, pictured outside the U.S. Capitol while flashing a white power sign, to the county’s Mosquito and Vector Control board after the man said he believed Microsoft founder Bill Gates had genetically modified mosquitoes in order to vaccinate Americans.
Fed up after nearly six years of this nonsense, voters there are finally repudiating the unqualified candidates they elected.
Shasta County’s Registrar of Voters Clint Curtis and County Supervisor Kevin W. Crye lost in the June primary. A third county supervisor, Chris Kelstrom, will go into the general election trailing behind a more moderate candidate.
Which brings us back to Duarte in the 4th District.
The wife of former U.S. Rep. John Duarte, she advanced from the June primary after incumbent Sen. Marie Alvarado-Gil was knocked out. She now faces Democrat Jaron Brandon, a Tuolumne County supervisor with governing experience — a sharp contrast to Duarte’s thin record.
Duarte likes to boast that she’s a farmer and a mother, not a politician; she’s raised around $1 million for her campaign so far, and only about $12,000 of it came from her husband’s failed bid to retain his seat in 2024.
In May, the Duarte campaign mailed out a flier to district homes showing a photo of her seemingly aiming a gun at a photo of Alvarado-Gil. The flier used profanity and said Alvarado-Gil “doesn’t support President Trump, holds hands with Kamala Harris, gave free healthcare to illegals, put tampons in boys’ bathrooms, made abortions easier to get, mandated vaccines, supports lockdowns, let Newsom’s germander (sic) pass, facing explosive sexual harassment allegations – and that’s just the start.”
Duarte promises to be a pro-business, pro-Trump candidate that will bring the president’s agenda to rural, inland California.
It’s the same platform and promises MAGA candidates made to voters in Shasta County six years ago in the middle of a pandemic, during a burst in populism and with the bankrolling of a far-right donor who had a grudge against Shasta County.
I’m all for a healthy opposition party at the Capitol. The Democrats have controlled the Legislature while homelessness has proliferated in California. But District 4 — much less the rest of California — can’t afford to send an inexperienced MAGA-pushing candidate like Duarte to Sacramento.
Brandon, Duarte’s opponent, may not be a conservative firebrand some voters in the district want, but he has governing experience.
Duarte’s only selling point is anger, and that’s never been enough to be an effective leader.
