NORCO, California — California’s resistance to Donald Trump is running into an uprising from within — here in a parched county east of Los Angeles punctuated by churches, celebrity retreats, and gravel horse trails stretching into the desert.
Throughout much of the 2010s, as progressives won local and state races and Democrats outstripped Republicans in voter registrations, party leaders believed they were making lasting inroads in Southern California’s Riverside County, the fourth most populous in the state. But far from transforming into a Democratic stronghold, the region is fast becoming a hotbed for Donald Trump-inspired showmen and a political farm system for some of the most powerful and notable members of the Republican bench.
Chad Bianco, a tough-talking, Stetson-wearing county sheriff, made a name for himself with his hard-line approach to crime andis now aiming to replace Gavin Newsom as the state’s governor. Bill Essayli, a firebrand legislator Trump appointed this springas a federal prosecutor for the state’s central district, built out his political reputation in Riverside County. Sonja Shaw, a local school board member who appears regularly on Fox News and is now running for state’s public school chief, rose to prominence over her opposition to transgender athletes in youth sports and policies that would require schools to disclose students' gender identity to their parents.
More are waiting in the wings.
The 2024 election humbled Democrats across California, as Trump increased his vote share in 45 of the state’s 58 counties. But their setbacks, and Trump’s inroads, were especially pronounced in Riverside, a 2.5 million-person microcosm of broader political shifts in the deep-blue state — above all, a turnout-stifling lack of enthusiasm and the drift of working class and Latino voters away from their onetime political home. In the end, Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate to carry Riverside and nearby San Bernardino County in 20 years.
State Democrats are scrambling to regain ground, while some Republicans, eager to replicate the brash, successful candidates from the region, wonder if Riverside offers a blueprint for state victories.
“For years, all the demographic trends were breaking toward an emerging Democratic coalition,” said Mike Madrid, a veteran Republican political consultant. “But there’s strong evidence, from my perspective, that the next 30 years are going to be looking very different in California. Coalitions are transforming.”
Of all the counties in California, the vast, arid region of Riverside seems an unlikely place for a political revolution.
Stretching from Los Angeles’ Santa Ana mountains deep into the center of the Mojave Desert, in its early days Riverside was primarily known as an agricultural community and a center of citrus production. In the 1910s and 1920s, Palm Springs and the broader Coachella Valley earned a reputation as a fashionable health tourism destination and, as travel to the desert became easier, the county began to sprout manufacturing and construction jobs. By the 1980s, Riverside was the fastest growing county in the state.
For decades, Republicans dominated county politics. But between 2012 and 2014, the tide appeared to shift. Los Angeles transplants were moving into the region, drawn to the space and lower cost of living. The county had gained nearly a million people since the turn of the century. New housing developments were popping up in old cow pastures, and bike lanes were built along irrigation canals. Warehouses, trucking, and logistics businesses moved into the area, bringing further jobs and opportunity.
And, quite suddenly, Democratic candidates began to win local elections. Dianne Feinstein narrowly carried the county in her 2012 Senate reelection. Voters elected a series of Democrats to represent them in the Legislature and in Congress. In 2020, Joe Biden won the county.
By 2021, the Norco City Council brought Pride Month to the city for the first time, spurred by a newly elected Democrat on the council named Katherine Aleman — who is now trying to flip a congressional seat. Longtime GOP Rep. Ken Calvert became vulnerable after redistricting dropped the liberal hub of Palm Springs into his district, spurring well-funded — if unsuccessful — challenges.
“We just kept electing more and more Democrats locally and to those partisan state offices,” said Jacob Daruvala, a 29-year-old political activist who grew up in Riverside and has worked on a series of Democratic campaigns in the region. “Then we went backwards.”
Trump painted the county red, taking advantage of lower turnout to eke out a plurality and reverse Biden’s eight-point win four years earlier. Democrats coughed up Assembly seats that were never supposed to be in play as nearly every Riverside Democrat lost their election bids. It was, as Daruvala described, a “wipeout.”
That turn is no accident, argues Jonathan Ingram, a former Riverside Republican Party chair. Voters are increasingly looking to Republicans as they become disillusioned with one-party control, he said, and combative politicians like Essayli, Bianco and Shaw embody their pent-up frustration with Democratic leaders over cost of living and social issues.
Bianco is a vocal supporter of Trump who regularly mirrors the president’s rhetoric as he lays into Democrats on crime, immigration, high taxes and affordability. In the past, he said he would not enforce state vaccine mandates, promised toend sanctuary laws, and was once a dues paying memberof the Oath Keepers, an extremist militia. When heendorsed Trump in 2024, he released a tongue-in-cheek video proclaiming “It’s time we put a felon in the White House. Trump 2024, baby.”
Shaw, meanwhile, leda successful effort in 2023 to bar teachers from displaying the Pride flag at Chino Valley Unified schools. That same year, she promoted a local policy requiring schools to inform parents if their child might be transgender, prompting the state to quickly sue the school district (last year, a court permanently blocked the policy). A Los Angeles Times profile of Shaw observed that depending on who you ask, she is a “righteous mother” or “a small-town bigot, basking in the celebrity she’s attained as a mouthpiece for Christian evangelicals.”
“I think they’re coming out fighting and swinging because people want to see results,” Ingram said. “I don’t know there is a center anymore when it comes to politics.”
For Democrats, that's a major problem. The party had expanded its ranks in the county by promoting a more moderate brand of center-left politics. But cost of living and other economic concerns are especially pronounced here. Longer commutes and lower wages mean economic issues resonate. Many residents who drive to Los Angeles for work spend hours each day on the highway to avoid paying for the toll road. Traffic grows worse by the year.
And while the county’s ever-more diverse suburbs had propelled Democrats to past victories, Bianco, Essayli, and Shaw’s wins in the half-decade leading up to 2024 were precursors to an election in which Republicans were able to capitalize on lower turnout and peel off voters who trusted the GOP more on core issues like public safety and the economy, said Democratic political consultant Derek Humphrey.
That migration, in swing states, was vital in delivering Trump the presidency and could reshape politics around the country — if it persists.
“There’s certainly concern,” Humphrey said. “The big question is: Was this a temporary shift? Or was it part of a long-term trend?”
In Norco, the traditional values of the Old West are (literally) embedded into the structure of the 25,000-person town. Gravel horse trails, groomed near-daily by city maintenance workers, lead to the piled haystacks at Tony’s Hay and Grain beside Norco’s Christian Community Church. On Corona Street, a series of corrals line the block, the mares inside watched over by an ironwork silhouette of two riders heading for a desert cross. New construction, by law, is required to look “Western” — a regulation taken so literally that the City Council once rejected the domed architecture of a planned Hindu temple for not fitting a “western aesthetic.”
The landscapes and neighborhood character of Riverside County, home to Joshua Tree National Park, are vast and varied — hard to generalize. Metropolitan cities like Riverside lie within county lines, as do mountain villages and remote desert communities.
But Norco, which has branded itself Horsetown, USA, feels like the spiritual center of the Republican rebirth in the county. Here, Chad Bianco campaign signs fill the street corners, affixed to street lights and fences.
Bianco insists that popularity in the area has nothing to do with party allegiance. In his view, Riverside County is interested in authenticity, not political stunts or the letter next to your name. He recalls first running for office in 2018 and being told by political professionals what to say and how to dress. Instead, he kept wearing jeans and a cowboy hat until (at least in his telling) his opponent started dressing that way too. Shaw, the conservative school board member now running for state superintendent, says she too resists party labels.
“I think we were fed that California is liberal, and maybe it is more liberal on certain policies — but I don't think it's liberal when it comes to our families, affordability, safety, and education,” Shaw said. “Anybody from the Inland Empire, I think that's what we have in common.”
It is not uncommon for politicians to view their own political opinions as moderate. And yet, there’s no doubt both Shaw and Bianco (as well as Essayli before them) have capitalized on partisan issues to propel their brands in Riverside County and across the country. Each of them were in position to run for state leadership in part because of the visibility and support they’ve earned from running on red-meat issues.
That strategy has served these candidates well so far. But Shaw and Bianco, in their current political campaigns for state superintendent and governor, respectively, now face the challenge of convincing a statewide electorate that is far more liberal than the voters they have faced thus far.
For all their success in Riverside, what works in Norco may be difficult to bring to scale.
Democrats have not given up on Riverside County or the surrounding Inland Empire. Multiple Democrats still represent the area in Congress and the Legislature, and the party is working to reclaim state legislative seats Republicans flipped in 2024, hoping they were flukes caused by low turnout or flawed candidates.
Democrats like Aleman, the former Norco city council member, are seeking once again to unseat Calvert — and they could get a major boost from a gerrymandering campaign that, if it succeeds, would shift Calvert’s seat toward Democrats.
The same factors that made the region so politically competitive over the last 15 years are likely to persist — above all, steady population growth. But the economic squeeze that’s pushing voters from expensive coastal cities into Riverside will test Democrats’ post-2024 pledge to focus on affordability concerns.
And at least in Norco, the challenge for Democrats runs deeper than economic considerations. The question will be if a candidate emerges that can tap into a power structure of faith and Old West ideology that has been so effective for the current class of GOP politicians.
“There was definitely a shift,” Daruvala said of the political mood nationally and Riverside County. “But from our perspective, it actually seemed like it started here.”
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