Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, a law-and-order voice often heard on Fox News, could be a Republican candidate for California governor in 2026, according to a new report.
Bianco has been approached to assess his interest in the 2026 race to succeed Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who cannot seek another term, according to Politico.
“California has a lot of problems and they’re looking outside the Sacramento political class to bring the state back,” adviser Nick Mirman told the political news outlet.
“No decision has been made and he’s continuing to have conversations.”
Politico noted that so far, at least five Democrats have either said they will enter the contest or are expected to do so.
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For now, Bianco’s focus is getting a proposition on this year’s ballot that could undo Proposition 47, which reclassified multiple crimes that at the time were felonies into misdemeanors, according to Fox News. Theft and drug offenses were included in the list of crimes that were downgraded.
“California, we’re in a very trying time right now when it comes to public safety and for the most part, from a law enforcement perspective, we can say that, we can attribute the majority of our issues that we are having, or at least, there’s some type of a correlation to them, to the passage of Prop 47 in 2012,” Bianco said.
He said the proposition “was everything that is bad about public safety right now, directly contributing to the increase in homelessness, mental health and drug addiction. [It] directly resulted in what we see now in our serial theft cases, in our retail theft cases and issues in crime of residential burglaries and those types of things.”
The proposal Bianco is backing would allow judges to recommend rehab for substance abusers and combine the value of multiple thefts to deter serial crimes by eventually getting to felony-level offenses.
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“It’s just plain and simple. But the reality is, without consequences, there is no reason for anyone to change behavior, and we need to get past this feel good way of what our legislators are doing now in this, this notion that it’s somebody else’s fault and you’re not responsible for your own actions. We need to move past that, and we need to get back to a time of common sense that would tell us if we can put you in rehab and help you, then great. We’ve helped you. We’ve helped society. But otherwise, then you’re going to have to do jail time, so we stop you from victimizing the rest of us.”
Newsom opposes the proposition.
“The governor is going to have no choice but to get on board because this is 100% complete common sense,” Bianco said.
“We have a complete failed political agenda in this state. It’s been a social experiment that has been led by the governor, from his time as mayor of San Francisco, into lieutenant governor and now governor, which has been made worse by our attorney general, who has absolutely no desire to fix any of these issues with crime and protect Californians,” he said.
“The voters have had enough,” Bianco said. “The voters are tired of what we’re seeing on TV with these smash and grabs. They’re tired of having their property stolen. They’re tired of seeing major retail businesses close in California and move their businesses out of state. We are experiencing a crisis here and our government leaders are doing nothing to combat it,” he said.
News: Southern California Sheriff Chad Bianco, an unsparing critic of Gavin Newsom & a conservative fixture on Fox News, is considering a run for California governor in 2026, POLITICO has learned.https://t.co/XSNz062sW7 pic.twitter.com/dADNW4rCQd
— Christopher Cadelago (@ccadelago) April 12, 2024
Bianco said he expects the measure will get enough signatures to make the ballot.
If it does not pass, he said, “We will be doing nothing but going downhill further. Crime will just remain rampant. Drugs will remain rampant. The disaster that we have with fentanyl and fentanyl dealers will continue to grow. More and more people will die of fentanyl overdoses and poisonings, and the smash and grab theft, this emboldened movement of criminals, will just be, it’s just going to get worse and worse.”
According to Ballotpedia, Bianco was elected in 2022 to his second four-year term as sheriff.
