A wildly entertaining race between two GOP leaders is about to hit Fresno | Opinion

For those really into politics, certain local elections of 2024 will have high entertainment value.

For starters, there is the announced campaigns of Fresno County Supervisor Steve Brandau and Fresno City Councilmember Garry Bredefeld. Brandau is up for re-election, and Bredefeld has just said that he plans to be the challenger.

It’s the Tea Party vs. MAGA. Brandau has been a strong conservative with roots going back to when the Tea Party was ascending as a national movement. Now the Make America Great Again wing of the GOP, aka Donald Trump, has prominence, and Bredefeld sounds themes that align with Trump’s stances, especially on cultural issues.

Where does the entertainment come in? Both Brandau and Bredefeld are well known for making outrageous comments.

Brandau once accused a representative of a local nonprofit as a being a “poverty pimp” over how her organization got financial support to do work on behalf of low-income people.

Bredefeld regularly posts on his Twitter account rants against “socialist Democrats”, the “fake media,” and “woke policies.” He is steadfastly anti-abortion and spoke out against a drag show at Fresno Chaffee Zoo. He roundly criticized the federal and state responses to the COVID pandemic.

While there is lots of time before any nomination papers are due, assuming that Brandau and Bredefeld do run against each other, how will that work out? I put the question to Dr. Thomas Holyoke, a political science professor at Fresno State who keeps tabs on local politics.

“It seems Brandau and Bredefeld represent a lot of the same voters — a very Republican bunch of voters,” Holyoke said. “Both have taken some high-profile, MAGA-like Republican stances and have been very vocal on social issues, especially Bredefeld.

“So it seems they will be playing to the same constituency. It makes for potentially a really interesting race.”

Brandau’s District 2 on the county board covers northwest and northeast Fresno and a portion of Clovis. Bredefeld’s council seat takes in that same northeast Fresno area, so there is some overlap.

For the decade and a half that Holyoke has lived in Fresno, he’s known those to be Republican-leaning neighborhoods, and they could be getting even more so.

“Increasingly in American politics, we have lot of self-selection on political leanings. I know a lot of people who have moved from central Fresno, which is where I live, to more conservative areas.”

Democratic contest

Not to be left out of the fun, there is a Democratic race to watch, too.

This past week Fresno Councilmember Luis Chavez announced he would run against county Supervisor Sal Quintero to represent the southeastern and central parts of the city.

Before being elected to the council, Chavez was chief of staff to Quintero, so it will be interesting to see how that history plays out.

Unlike the Republicans, Quintero and Chavez are more measured and moderate in their speech and social media. But the fact that the former aide is running against his boss is notable.

“Often what tends to happen is the aging politician would see the former staffer as ideal replacement,” Holyoke explained. He speculated that Quintero might view Chavez’s jump into the race as a betrayal.

End of an era

A longtime Fresno politician has also decided he won’t be seeking office as planned.

Assemblymember Jim Patterson, Fresno’s former mayor, is in his final term before the required limits push him out of office next year.

He thought about running against Brandau. But on the same day Bredefeld announced he was in, Patterson said he was bowing out.

“I believe my skills, talents, and relationships can do the most good for the most people here in the private sector,” Patterson said in a news release.

Patterson has been in the Assembly for 12 years, the most allowed, and for all of that time has been in the GOP minority. He calls Democrats “the ruling class” because of their iron-grip control of the Legislature.

He has played the role of opposition well, notably leading the call for an audit of the DMV. He also authored a bill called Gavin’s Law, which would lengthen prison time for those found guilty of a fatal hit-and-run crash. It is named for Gavin Gladding, a Clovis Unified school administrator who was killed on a morning jog by a driver who then fled the scene. Democrats have kept it from passing, a point of bitter frustration for Patterson.