The Republican-dominated Huntington Beach city council is taking the fight to Sacramento on everything from trans school policies to voter ID laws.
When a slate of Republicans worked together in 2022 to win back control of the Huntington Beach, Calif., city council, the four candidates signed a “contract” with voters. Most of the planks weren’t particularly controversial: They pledged to combat homelessness, crack down on crime, slash red tape, and roll out the red carpet to businesses.
But it was the first plank of the contract — a vow to give the city attorney the authority to fight Sacramento overreach, including state housing mandates — that has in many ways come to define an aggressive new brand of Surf City politics.
After taking over the board, those Republicans have transformed this laid-back beach community into the unofficial headquarters of the resistance to Governor Gavin Newsom and the blue-state policies championed by the Democrats who run the state. Huntington Beach leaders have repeatedly fought the state in court over laws they believe infringe on their rights to govern locally, and they’ve passed laws of their own taking aim at left-wing shibboleths, including Pride flags, Covid masks, and sexually-explicit library books.
The populist pushback is almost certain to intensify over the coming years after a slate of three more conservatives romped the council’s last three liberals on Election Day, giving them a 7–0 board supermajority. They celebrated on swearing-in day, donning red “Make Huntington Beach Great Again” hats with “7–0” embroidered on the side — a not-so-subtle poke in the eye to their left-wing critics.
Councilman Tony Strickland, a former Republican state assemblyman, dubbed the new majority the “MAGA-nificent 7.”
But while there will almost surely be plenty of more fights to be had as Newsom sets himself up for a likely 2028 presidential run, Pat Burns, a councilman who is now serving as Huntington Beach’s mayor, insists that despite their rambunctious reputation, sparring with the governor isn’t his and the board’s primary mission.
“My mission is just to do the right thing for the people, the businesses, and our community,” Burns, a former police officer, told National Review. “And I’ll keep doing that, regardless of what that piece of s**t Newsom wants.”
Councilman Casey McKeon, now mayor pro tempore, agreed that the board’s conservatives aren’t out looking for trouble; they’re just trying to do right by their citizens.
“We don’t have an agenda to go out and do controversial things,” he said. “We’re just solving problems as they come across.”
Dan Kalmick, one of the three left-wing council members who lost in November, has a different view. He told Reuters in February that the board’s conservatives seem be driven by “nihilism,” “spite and trying to own the libs,” and added that “taking this level of national politics down to the local level breaks local government, and that’s what we’ve done.”
Surf City or Angrytown, USA?
Located on the Pacific coast south of Los Angeles, Huntington Beach — trademarked as Surf City, USA — is best known for its ten miles of uninterrupted beaches and its iconic pier. For decades the city has hosted the U.S. Open of Surfing, the world’s largest surfing competition. Huntington Beach has a population of about 200,000, making it Orange County’s fourth-largest city.
Once a bastion of California conservatism, Orange County has drifted to the left in recent decades owing to demographic changes. Democrats now outnumber Republicans countywide. That’s not the case in Huntington Beach, though. About 41 percent of the city’s voters are registered Republicans, while only 30 percent are Democrats.
McKeon said Huntington Beach and some of Southern California’s other right-leaning coastal cities are evidence that the region isn’t as solidly Democratic as many believe.
“I always tell people we’re not as blue as the national media says we are,” he said. “It’s just those big urban centers we have to compete with.”
Despite its generally relaxed vibes, Huntington Beach also has something of a rebellious streak and a scrappy image dating back to the early 20th century when its leaders fought with surrounding cities for access to a rail line, McKeon said.
“That’s just been in our DNA and it’s continued to this day,” he said.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, the city’s pier became a gathering spot for anti-lockdown protesters. A Los Angeles Times column in 2020 dubbed Huntington Beach “Angrytown, USA.” The city sued the state that year, claiming that Newsom overstepped his authority by closing the city’s beaches. When Newsom instituted a 10 p.m. statewide curfew, “there was a huge party down at the pier until one in the morning,” McKeon said.
But the makeup of the city council hasn’t always reflected the city’s rightward tilt.
During the first Trump administration, the council leaned to the left, with Democrats holding a majority of seats. The board took a harder left turn in 2021 when then-councilman Tito Ortiz, a Trump-supporting former mixed-martial-arts champion, resigned and his former colleagues on the council filled his seat with a left-wing Democrat.
“Within a heartbeat it became a 6–1 [left-leaning] council,” Burns said.
Ahead of the 2022 elections, when four council seats were on the ballot, Huntington Beach conservatives tried a new strategy. McKeon said that historically there have been so many right-leaning candidates on the ballot that the Republican vote was split, giving Democrats an opening. In 2022, Burns and McKeon teamed up Tony Strickland and parental-rights activist Gracey Van Der Mark and they ran together, campaigning as a conservative “unity” slate.
“We did like over 110 events at people’s houses, at parks, at restaurants. And that was our message, ‘Don’t split the vote.’ And it worked,” McKeon said.
The four conservatives were the top vote getters, shifting the officially nonpartisan board from a 6–1 leftwing majority to a 4–3 majority in their favor. They immediately got to work changing the direction of the city.
Making Huntington Beach Great Again
In early 2023, the new council voted 4–3 to prohibit flying most nongovernmental flags on city property, reversing the previous council’s unanimous approval of flying the LGBTQ Pride flag for six weeks every spring. Newsom chimed in, calling the vote “shameful,” a “disgrace,” and an example of “rank, rank, performative politics.”
One local activist told NBC News that Huntington Beach’s conservative council “is run by a hateful majority whose only interest is advancing an agenda of intolerance for minority communities, including LGBTQ+ individuals.”
McKeon defended the move, saying that a city government funded by taxpayers should fly only “flags that represent us all equally.”
“I went to [the University of Southern California]. On game day should we fly the USC football flag? I’m pretty sure my UCLA brethren would have an issue with that,” he said.
Despite Newsom’s outrage, other governments, including the Orange County Board of Supervisors, followed suit, also barring nongovernmental flags from government property. And in March, more than 58 percent of Huntington Beach voters approved a ballot measure enshrining the flag limits in the city’s charter.
After the flag vote, the council voted 4–3 in September 2023 to ban mask and Covid-19 vaccine mandates in the city. The following month they passed a resolution establishing a panel to vet children’s library books for sexually-explicit materials and to move age-inappropriate books out of the children’s section. When state Democrats passed a bill in August to prohibit alleged “book bans” in public libraries, Huntington Beach’s city attorney, Michael Gates, vowed to fight back if the state tried to crack down on their city.
In February, the council voted to officially express solidarity with Texas in its fight with the Biden administration over the administration’s lax enforcement of the southern border. Critics blasted the move, saying it had nothing to do with city business.
In April, California’s far-left attorney general Rob Bonta and secretary of state Shirley Weber sued Huntington Beach, alleging that a ballot measure approved by voters in March requiring voters in municipal elections to show a valid identification before casting a ballot “unlawfully conflicts with and is preempted by state law.”
Gates, the city attorney, argued, as he often does in legal challenges against the state, that Huntington Beach is a charter city and that that status provides it more local control and freedom from state interference. “Having a charter is basically emancipation or independence from the state of California,” he claims in an online video.
State officials reject that, arguing that having a charter doesn’t make Huntington Beach a 51st state. In September, Newsom signed Senate Bill 1174, a new law that, targeting Huntington Beach, bars governing bodies overseeing California elections — including those in charter cities — from requiring voters to show ID.
The city declared an early legal victory in November when an Orange County judge ruled that their voter ID law could stand. Bonta has vowed to appeal. Gates called the ruling a “black eye for the state of California,” according to the Orange County Register.
In September, Huntington Beach teamed up with the America First Legal Foundation, a Trump-aligned civil rights group, to go on offense against a new state law that prohibits school officials from alerting parents if their kids show symptoms of gender dysphoria, including requesting to use new pronouns or restrooms of the opposite sex.
“The State of California is now using state law to force schools to hide a child’s desire to ‘gender transition’ from parents. This is outrageous,” Gene Hamilton, America First Legal’s executive director, said in a prepared statement. “Parents — not the government or any school system — have the utmost right to raise their children and protect their children from this dangerous ideology.”
While many of Huntington Beach’s most prominent recent legal fights have a culture-war tinge, the city is also continuing a yearslong fight against state housing mandates that would force it to build thousands of new units and essentially abolish single-family zoning. The city and the state have been trading lawsuits for years.
“We’re 100 percent built out. We have limited infrastructure, limited resources, water table, police force, all those things,” said McKeon, a real estate investor and developer. “Our suburban beach town, it would be destroyed forever.”
While he is open to “realistic” solutions to developing new housing, McKeon said he and his colleagues oppose “one-size-fits-all” mandates from Sacramento.
“If Sacramento can come in and start mandating how cities are zoned and their land use, why even have city councils?” McKeon said.
Burns questioned why “if there’s a housing shortage,” Newsom is “letting a bunch of illegals cross the border by the millions into our state?”
While Huntington Beach has been on the losing end of several legal rulings in its housing fight, a Los Angeles County judge recently ruled in favor of Redondo Beach and four other cities, finding that a 2021 law allowing single-family lots to be split in two was unconstitutional. Burns called it a “big, big win for self control.”
While their fights against the state have generated most of the headlines, Burns and McKeon both said their focus is on improving Huntington Beach.
Burns said the conservative council is really just trying to “bring Huntington Beach back to Huntington Beach.” Despite two years on the council and now serving as mayor, he said he still doesn’t see himself as a politician. “I’m just a guy trying to do a job.”
McKeon noted that their more nuts-and-bolts efforts to address homelessness, fill police force vacancies, improve public safety, and streamline city hall permitting are equally important but have received less attention.
“If your city’s not safe, then people don’t want to live here, they don’t want to shop here, they don’t want to invest and open their business here,” he said.
He said he wants Huntington Beach to be like it was when he was a kid: “fun, not all this angst.”
As for the “Make Huntington Beach Great Again” hats, McKeon said it was just for fun — a supporter in the crowd was handing them out. It doesn’t mean that Huntington Beach isn’t already a great city, he said, but “it could always be better, right?”