After a tumultuous first term rife with controversy, Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva was soundly defeated in his re-election bid on Tuesday by Robert Luna, a former police chief supported by prominent California Democrats.
After Luna jumped into the lead on election night, the incumbent sheriff finally conceded defeat around 3 p.m. local time after receiving just 40 percent of the vote as of Tuesday.
“I want to wish the incoming sheriff well,” Villanueva said. “The safety of the community depends on him succeeding.”
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Luna, who was police chief of Long Beach for seven years before retiring last year, is now poised to be the top cop in America’s most populous county. His victory suggests many voters grew tired of Villanueva’s scandals and repeated appearances on Fox News that earned him the nickname “Sheriff Trump” from some critics.
Villanueva made history in 2018 when he became the first candidate in 104 years to unseat a sitting sheriff in Los Angeles County. He ran as a progressive, promising to reform the department and increase community policing. He also vowed to halt the hiring of new deputies from outside the county so deputies were from the communities they policed.
What Villanueva delivered, however, was countless scandals. During the heart of the coronavirus pandemic, he refused to enforce vaccine mandates for the department’s staff and deputies, and later refused to enforce mask mandates.
Villanueva went on a rampage, saying it was “morally repulsive” for “woke politicians” to force his employees to be vaccinated, alleging it’d cause a mass exodus of workers.
“We’re gonna continue to serve the community, I don’t care what these woke politicians want to do. But hopefully one day they're not going to be in office anymore,” Villanueva told Fox News in February.
Just a few months later, Alene Tchekmedyian, a Los Angeles Times reporter, obtained internal departmental records that alleged Villanueva launched a cover-up for a deputy who kneeled on a cuffed inmate’s head for three minutes in 2021. Villanueva went on another unhinged rant about the incident, claiming it was manufactured by the Los Angeles Times and his critics to derail his re-election campaign.
Days later, the Times reported that a legal claim had been filed against Villanueva, alleging he’d obstructed justice and retaliated against those who tried to expose him.
“The sheriff has been nonstop in a campaign of intimidation against anyone responsible for oversight,” Max Huntsman, the L.A. County Inspector General, who Villanueva has—without evidence—described as a “Holocaust Denier,” told The Daily Beast in September.
Villanueva’s tenure was also plagued by accusations he didn’t try to stamp out violent gangs within the department itself, run by rank-and-file cops. It culminated last year, when he ignored a subpoena and refused to testify to the Civilian Oversight Commission—set up in 2016 to fight against gangs within LASD—about his efforts, or lack thereof.
Villanueva then made national headlines again in September, when he ordered his deputies to raid the homes of two of his critics—Supervisor Sheila Kuehl and Oversight Commissioner Patti Giggans—supposedly to investigate possible bribery. But the local district attorney has insisted that neither woman committed a crime, and said the office would not defend the search warrants if they were challenged in court—prompting critics to declare the raids were just brazen retaliation by Villanueva.
These controversies, paired with regular outbursts in press conferences, opened the door for Luna to replace Villanueva with overwhelming progressive support, including endorsements from the Los Angeles County Democratic Party and Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
Villanueva’s defeat likely hasn’t shocked most in Southern California. During primaries in June, he captured just 31 percent of the vote, an underwhelming number for an incumbent despite finishing in first. Luna received 26 percent of the vote then, which set up Tuesday’s runoff.
Luna’s victory came despite polls showing he was far from a household name in the county of nearly 10 million, the Los Angeles Times reported. Some political strategists in California said that was likely the East Los Angeles native’s largest hurdle—just getting his name out there.
“This has had sort of a character of almost a recall election, where you don’t really know the replacement candidates all that well but you decide whether to keep the incumbent in office,” Raphe Sonenshein, a public affairs researcher at Cal State Los Angeles, told the Times.
Luna ran on promises to keep Los Angeles County out of the news for the wrong reasons, like attacking local journalists, and instead said he wants to focus on slowing violent crime and controlling a sprawling homeless population, he told KCAL9 on Tuesday.
With victory secured, Luna will take over as sheriff next month. He’ll be tasked with leading a department of nearly 11,000 deputies that’s been victim to repeated turnover in leadership, with four different top cops since Sheriff Lee Baca was busted in a federal corruption probe eight years ago that ultimately sent him to prison.
