The race for California governor is wide open since Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom is currently serving his second term. By law, he is ineligible to run as California caps off candidates at two four-year terms in a lifetime.
Riverside County Sheriff, Chad Bianco, is the first well-known Republican to announce he will be running for California governor. Bianco, a fervid supporter of current President Donald J. Trump and critic of Gov. Newsom, shared in a livestream, “This is not going to be about party politics, this is going to be about fixing a broken state to make this the state that everyone in the country wants to come to.”
First elected as sheriff in 2018 and reelected in 2022, Bianco has built a reputation as a vocal critic of the state Legislature’s Democratic supermajority. During the duration of his tenure as sheriff of Riverside County, Bianco has made an array of questionable choices. One such being not enforcing the vaccine mandate on Sheriff’s Department employees amidst the horrors of the COVID-19 pandemic.
During the beginning of the pandemic, Bianco issued a statement in which he expressed, “My belief [in] whether or not to receive a vaccine is a personal decision, not something an overreaching government has the power to impose on an individual.”
For an individual in a position of power overseeing a team of more than 3,600 employees, this was a dangerous move to make. Those in the department are majority essential workers, and by not requiring them to get vaccinated, they not only make themselves susceptible to the virus, but also puts their community at risk.
Bianco admitted that at one point during the early stages of the pandemic, more than 40 percent of his staff had tested positive. And in a boorish defense, he simply stated, “I don’t know the number of people that are vaccinated. Quite frankly, I don’t care.”
Displaying a clear disregard for those vulnerable to the virus in his community, such as children, elders, and immunocompromised, Bianco risked the health of those he serves. In addition, by outwardly stating that he does not care whether or not his employees are vaccinated, he is also saying he doesn’t care about their health and safety in the workplace.
While this in and of itself is atrocious, Bianco also blatantly spreads misinformation to the public. Sheriff Bianco firmly believed that natural immunity is more effective than vaccines, and that “99.875% of the people get over [Covid-19].” At this point of the pandemic, late 2021, around 12,000-15,000 people were dying on a weekly basis as a result of the virus. That is far from the near perfect recovery rate that Bianco was spouting lies about.
This sorry excuse for a sheriff running for California governor is a long-shot in the making. California’s voter profile is majority Democratic, standing at 46.2 percent, and it would take a miracle for Bianco to win the seat. Even in the 2024 state senate election, Democrat Adam Schiff and Republican Steve Garvey ended with a Schiff landslide win at 58.4 percent of the votes.
With a campaign platform centered on fighting crime and Sacramento’s Democratic leadership, Bianco holds appeal to California’s conservative voting base. He called out the state for being an “echo chamber” which reuses the same policies over and over again, and placed blame on them for the “decline of California.” Citing various downfalls such as “rampant crime, higher taxes, the highest cost of living in our nation, tent encampments in every major city, more fentanyl deaths, catastrophic fires”, Bianco outlines what he considers the decline of the California dream into a nightmare.
While a majority of his campaign seems to be focused on the concerns of California residents, Bianco has also shown through past actions that he does not care for their well-being as much as he claims to. His policy moves and visions for California seem to reflect many of Trump’s conservative ideologies, including his open support of bolstering border security.
Bianco even went as far to say that he is willing to reform California’s sanctuary state law, which restricts local law enforcement from working with federal immigration authorities, and until then, he will be doing everything within the confines of the law to cooperate with U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and “remove criminals from our jails.”
It may be simple to label Bianco as a dangerous individual running for office due to his loudmouth tendencies and ideologies that he spreads, but in reality, he is just not as well-equipped as he makes himself out to be.
In 2014, Bianco admitted that he paid dues to the Oath Keepers, a far-right militia whose leaders were convicted in the aftermath of the Capitol Riot. He defended himself at the time by stating that he had only paid for a year’s membership, and forgot afterwards that he belonged to the group. This is not the greatest excuse, nor a good reason, to be involved with that organization.
At the end of the day, Chad Bianco is just a man with a platform, and he is not well-suited to be a sheriff, let alone California’s next Governor.
