‘I hope for the 1960s’: Republicans in Santa Cruz County come out of hiding after Trump’s victory

By 7 p.m. on Election Night, concern was already beginning to give way to despair across much of deep blue Santa Cruz County as former president Donald Trump stacked up win after win.

Yet, in downtown Santa Cruz, on the second floor of a modern apartment building, a quiet hallway led to a packed and lively community space where Trump 2024 banners girded potluck tables and credenzas, supporters young and old displayed their Make America Great Again accouterments, and Laura Ingraham’s voice poured in from a television set with the latest numbers out of North Carolina.

“Woo! Yeah!” someone yelled.

Thomas Quinn, the onetime host of his eponymous KSCO radio show, emerged from the crowd, tanned with a crisp, white-collared button-down tucked into chinos, his gray hair combed to the side.

“Whether someone likes Trump or doesn’t like Trump, everyone on this planet Earth should get down on their hands and knees and thank God he turned up, because he’s changed the dynamics of politics, globally,” Quinn said.

California and the West Coast have long operated as the bleeding edge for the nation’s liberal politics and ideas. Within the state, Santa Cruz County is a particularly blue enclave, a place where progressivism is essential to its sense of self. Rarely do conservatives rise to powerful posts, nor take up much space within the public square, especially over the past eight years as, more and more, deep irreconcilable divides seem to define politics.

But on the seesaw of Election Night, each update seemed to land on Democrats like a 50-pound weight and send the energy of this Trump-supporting crowd skyward. Now, the momentum of the former president’s roaring comeback is inspiring some of his local supporters to emerge from the political margins. 

“They’re your neighbors, they’re people that you know and see every day, you see them at the grocery store and would never know they’re Trumpers,” said Tom Decker, a conservative resident of the Santa Cruz Mountains who launched an unsuccessful primary bid for District 5 supervisor earlier this year. Decker has voted for Trump in the past three elections. “They’re going to quietly do what Trumpers do, quietly live their lives and only get up and do something when they have to.”

The Trump bump is not just a national phenomenon. As of Friday’s returns, Trump had secured 21.2% of the popular vote in Santa Cruz County, higher than any Republican presidential candidate since George W. Bush scored more than 24% of the vote in 2004 (Trump in 2024 and Bush in 2004 are the only Republican presidential candidates in the past 30 years to win the nation’s popular vote, as well). 

Last Wednesday, Republican Mike Lelieur gathered a bunch of people to wave Trump flags over the Branciforte Avenue bridge that extends across Highway 1. Lelieur sees the former president’s victory as an inflection point for his local supporters to come out of hiding. 

“A lot of people stopped off to talk to us and they said, ‘You know, I’m not going to hide anymore, now that he’s won, I think I can come out of the closet,’” Lelieur said. “I wore my Trump hat into the store afterwards and, sure I got a couple dirty looks but I got a lot of smiles and people coming up to me saying, ‘Hey, he did it, he did it!’ It was pretty positive.”

Originally from the Modesto area, Lelieur worked on the California operation for Ron Paul’s presidential campaign in 2012. Like many Republicans, he came to Trump late, after meeting him at an event in 2015. Lelieur said he was completely taken by Trump’s ability to command a room.

As Fox News host Bret Baier updated viewers on Tuesday night with the returns from Ohio, Lelieur looked on, a maroon can of Sierra Nevada’s Celebration IPA in his grip, a black “ULTRA MAGA” T-shirt on his chest, a wide smile across his face. 

“My friends who don’t like him, I tell them, ‘Turn off the television, don’t watch what he does,’ said Lelieur, who then guides Trump opponents to his interviews with Tucker Carlson and Dr. Phil. “That’s the real Donald Trump, that’s the guy I saw in the room. The guy on stage at his rallies, that’s an act.”

Moments later, a tall, thin and suntanned man with a British accent swaggered over to greet Lelieur, who recognized him from his work with the local Robert F. Kennedy Jr. campaign. I asked Nick, who offered only his first name, what brought him to the Trump party. He asked to step outside for a moment to speak more privately.

“I actually voted Jill Stein today,” Nick said, coyly. He said he voted for Trump in 2016 and forgets whether he voted in 2020 but knows it wasn’t for Trump. “They’d crucify me in here. I am conservative but I’m a peace activist and the war in Gaza is more important to me than anything else right now. I could never endorse Kamala for what they’ve done, and Trump is a wild card.”

A Santa Cruz resident for the past 30 years, he admitted it has been “challenging” to live as a conservative, particularly in recent years.

“It’s so divisive now, in all areas of life, friendships, dating, marriages, relationships, even work,” Nick said. “It’s almost like a litmus test for me as to who I want to really spend my life with. There is a camaraderie among people who want to know and seek the truth and evolve as human beings.”

Gayle Bradshaw, a member of the California Republican Assembly’s local chapter who helped organize the Election Night party, said she had never voted in a presidential election before 2016 and couldn’t distinguish much between Democrats and Republicans. Bradshaw, her neat silver hair sitting above fierce, dark eyebrows, recounted her slow introduction to Trump with a sort of bubbly excitement. His “hilarious” debate performances, the media’s incessant attacks, her revived Christian faith and a growing interest in the far-right political movement QAnon combined to produce a steadfast support of Trump. 

Eight years later, she is beginning to feel a revolution, albeit a slow one, from people locally toward embracing the former, and now future, president. 

“I think a lot of us are still hiding, but when we do our banner waves over the highway, people are honking like crazy now, everything from trucks to Priuses,” Bradshaw said. “When we first started eight years ago, we’d have way more middle fingers and less honking. Now that’s completely reversed.”

Trump’s 2016 victory brought some resurgence of conservative-minded people to the public square, said Adam Spickler, a trans man who sits on the Cabrillo College board of trustees and has been involved in politics for two decades. However, it wasn’t accompanied with the harsh rhetoric the nation was seeing in the halls of Washington D.C. 

“There is an understanding among local conservatives that, if you’re smart enough and you want to get involved in the public sphere around here, you still care about your neighbors and you still care about the civil and social and equal rights that people in this community care about,” Spickler said. 

However, he warned against “validated” Trump supporters who might want to “act out” in the wake of his election. He said local residents don’t deserve “a victory run that makes people fear their own personal safety and livelihood and standing in the community.” 

Trump’s rhetoric on the campaign trail has been a constant source of concern for many vulnerable groups, particularly the LGBTQ+ community, through ads such as “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you,” and promises to cut federal funds to schools that recognize transgender identity. A pillar of his platform has been a promise to conduct “the largest deportation operation in American history,” which has many folks in South County concerned about what the next four years might bring. 

These more inflammatory positions, as well as vaccine skepticism, and talk of a “deep state” and a shadowy cabal of global economic elite who are trying to bring about a New World Order, have been embraced by some local conservatives. 

“The reality of what’s going on is much darker than what most people consider,” said Thomas Quinn, the former radio host, on election night, as he started down the rabbit hole on topics like Jeffrey Epstein, P. Diddy, Bill Gates, various “incestuous freaks” and corruption at the World Economic Forum. “The thing I like about Trump is that he’s challenging these assholes on both sides publicly and vocally.”

As with more than a few people celebrating Trump’s win in downtown Santa Cruz last Tuesday, Nick, the Stein voter, said he felt the government constantly lied “on virtually every level about COVID,” and said he met many of the people at the Trump party through activism against vaccine injury. He brought up alternate theories on who murdered John F. Kennedy, and criticized the childhood vaccination schedule.

Bradshaw said she was disappointed in the state’s conservatives for not fighting harder “against the transgender stuff.” She hopes a Trump presidency brings the formation of a “committee that will look at these doctors who are promoting this stuff.” However, she said she doesn’t want to see “anything negative” happen to people who are transgender. 

“It’s going to be a situation where we’ll educate and stop the propaganda in the schools,” Bradshaw said. “This is promoted by the schools and by the media and by the propaganda everywhere. This has got to stop, this is so anti-Christian, so against the Bible. This is what happens when you take God out of the school and you take God out of our government.”

Lelieur said he doesn’t understand why it’s so difficult for immigrants to gain legal entry into the country and believes the system needs to change. As far as Trump’s promise of the largest deportation operation in American history, Lelieur thinks Trump will focus on deporting undocumented criminals and “any of the gangsters and cartels.”

“Once that starts happening, if you’re undocumented, you’re probably going to be living in the shadows and be a little nervous,” Lelieur said. “But I think we’ll get to a point where the government wants to figure out how to help [undocumented immigrants] who have been contributing become citizens. The whole system needs to be redone. I think they should make it easier.”

Decker said he doesn’t believe Trump is going to round up and deport every undocumented immigrant, but he expects a Trump presidency will make it difficult for them to live here without citizenship, eventually leading to a mass “self-deportation.”

“They have no right to be here,” Decker said of undocumented immigrants, an estimated 19,500 of whom live in Santa Cruz County. “No, we’re not going to throw them out, but they have no right to public funds. I think Trump is going to say that we can’t give them free medicine, free dental, free rent … that we can’t do any of this, they’re not actually citizens, nor can they work, but they can stay.”

Ultimately, what do these local Trump supporters want out of the next four years? 

“I hope for the 1960s,” Decker said. “I was raised in the 1960s, everyone I knew had a mom and dad; the fathers went to work, the mothers stayed home, they raised families of five or six. They owned their homes, they owned cars, nobody had debt, one income was enough to raise a family of six or seven, send them to college and get started in life. That’s what I want.”

“What I hope for, is that we will not go into a communist state, we will not be arrested for our beliefs, we will not be thrown in jail, and we will not have the New World Order implemented like what Obama started and [Hillary] Clinton was supposed to finish,” Bradshaw said. “We will have our freedom, and all the promises that Trump made, he will keep.” 

“He’s the only president to not get us into a war, and my main thing is that I want him on Day 1 to fix all the threats we have,” Lelieur said. “I know he’s going to do it. And then I want him to clean up the government and corruption.”

Lelieur also offered one piece of advice for his many neighbors who didn’t want a second Trump term. 

“I lived through eight years of Obama, I lived through Biden, you’re going to live through Trump,” Lelieur said. “He might surprise you. With Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on his team, he might just surprise the heck out of you.” 

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