Huntington Beach City Councilman Tony Strickland made a big announcement on the steps of city hall last week: after over a decade away, he’s headed back to Sacramento as a senator.
“We won our election to the California State Senate and I, Tony Strickland, will be your state senator for the next two years,” Strickland said. “Today’s the first step in making California golden again.”
His return to California’s state house comes nearly 20 years after he was first elected to the senate in 2008, when he lived in Ventura County.
It was the last elected position he held ten years ago amidst three failed campaigns for higher office, a $40,000 fine for violating campaign financing rules and a divorce.
But Strickland found new political life in Orange County.
He spearheaded efforts to flip a majority Democrat city council in Huntington Beach to a 7-0 Republican dais – building a city council that now serves as one of the loudest local voices in California criticizing Democratic state leaders over housing mandates and government overreach.
[Read: Will Huntington Beach’s Legal Argument of Limited Independence Hold up in Court?]
Now, Strickland says he plans to carry that same voice into the California Senate, vowing to not increase gas taxes and to reign in spending.
Rise in Ventura County
Strickland’s been involved in politics since the age of 12, growing up in the Simi Valley where he started handing out signs for then-Assemblyman Tom McClintock (R), who’s staff he later worked on before McClintock went on to become a Congressman.
“I was known even as a campaign operative back then,” Strickland said in a Wednesday interview, speaking on his time at Whittier College. “I think I ran six campaigns before I was 27.”
Strickland’s first stint in elected office came in 1998, when he won election at the age of 28 to the California State Assembly and held the seat for the next six years, at which point he was termed out and was succeeded by his wife at the time, Audra Strickland.
After a failed run for State Controller in 2006, he came back to win the most competitive state senate race in California in 2008, winning a four year term by just 857 votes while Audra held onto his old seat in the assembly.
But after that victory, things stalled out.
The Ventura Fall
In 2010, he ran for State Controller again and lost by a wider margin than he did in 2006. Audra Stickland was termed out of the assembly that same year and lost her race for Ventura County Supervisor.
Rather than try for reelection in 2012, Tony Strickland instead ran for Congress and lost.
He ran for a different congressional seat in 2014 and lost again, choosing to open his own political consulting firm in 2015 rather than run for another elected office.
His marriage to Audra ended in divorce that same year.
Strickland’s last big headlines in Ventura County came in May 2016, when he agreed to a $40,000 fine from the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission, the chief watchdog over campaign finance.
Commission staff concluded Strickland helped illegally launder over $65,000 of donations through the Ventura and Stanislaus County Republican Parties during his 2010 race for controller.
Strickland denied he ever laundered the money, saying he settled to move on from the case after six years of investigations.
Rebirth in Orange County
After growing up and spending most of his life in the Simi Valley, Strickland moved to Huntington Beach for one reason – his new wife, Carla, who he met at a USC football game.
“She was a Huntington Beach girl,” Strickland said. “So I came to Huntington Beach.”
Strickland said he had no intention of running for office again until he got a call from then-Representative Michelle Steel and her husband Shawn Steel, the Republican National Committeeman for California, who asked to meet him for lunch.
“Shawn Steel’s like my crazy uncle,” Strickland said. “It was their idea. They said Huntington Beach was on the wrong path, the city needs a turnaround … you should think about running for city council.”
At the time, the city council held five Democrats and two Republicans, with many votes ending in a 6-1 split.
The most outspoken Republican on the dais had been Tito Ortiz, a former UFC champion dubbed the Huntington Beach Bad Boy, who won over 42,000 votes and joined the city council in 2020 but resigned just six months later.
[Read: Tito Ortiz Resigns From Huntington Beach City Council]
Strickland said he saw Ortiz as a sign that people were voting for more conservative candidates, but they weren’t organized enough to get elected due to in-fighting amongst the party.
“When Tito ran, 68% of the vote went to center-right candidates, but they only won one seat,” Strickland said. “I said you’ve got to cut this splitting the vote, and have us come together.”
The Creation of the Fab Four
Two of those candidates in 2020 were Gracey Van Der Mark and Casey McKeon, who ran together that year, but both fell thousands of votes short of the city council and were running again in 2022 alongside Pat Burns.
“At first Gracey and Casey hated my guts. They said, ‘Who is this guy coming in here?’” Strickland said. “I was campaigning on my own, but I always said the way we’d win is if we campaigned together and not split the vote.”
“I provided a lot of structure, leadership and experience,” he continued. “They had a big following among the activists in the city.”
Members of the county Republican Party and the Lincoln Club, a major Republican donor group, pushed to bring Strickland onto the planned slate but kept hitting roadblocks until Van Der Mark sat down one on one with Strickland for three hours at Buon Gusto.
“Casey and I automatically came together because we’d already run together in 2020. We met Pat and were looking for a fourth,” Van Der Mark said in a Wednesday interview. “After those three hours I went home and made a few phone calls and said ‘Tony’s our guy.’”
Those four united their campaigns to run as a slate, later dubbed the Fab Four, all telling voters the same thing in over 100 events leading up to election day – don’t split the vote.
“I’m asking you to vote for me, but I’m also asking you to vote for our team,” Strickland told voters at their last meet and greet before Election Day. “We really need to run the table and all four of us need to get elected to have the majority.”
Strickland was also one of the financial backbones of their slate, raising over $208,000 at a time when the city’s donation limit was capped at $620 a donor.
McKeon, Van Der Mark and Burns raised $210,000 combined in that same period, but Strickland said they all contributed equally to their shared advertising.
All four won the 2022 election in a landslide, beating out their nearest competition by nearly 12,000 votes.
[Read: Republicans on Track to Retake Huntington Beach City Council]
City Council Fastracks Controversial Proposals
The new majority swiftly appointed Strickland mayor and started calling out state leaders on housing mandates.
In less than three months, they cracked down on homelessness, raised campaign contribution limits, banned the flying of the pride flag at city hall and sued Governor Gavin Newsom, arguing that state mandates to zone for more affordable housing were illegal.
[Read: California’s Battle With Huntington Beach Over Housing Goals Heads To Court]
That suit was the first of many with state leaders over the next two years on issues like housing and voter ID, with city officials – including Strickland – repeatedly arguing the city had the right to decide its own future as a charter city.
[Read: Will Huntington Beach’s Legal Argument of Limited Independence Hold up in Court?]
Back home, city leaders voted to leave the Orange County Power Authority they’d helped open, changed rules around the prayers to start meetings and made heavy cuts to fill a $7 million deficit in the budget.
Strickland called the budget cuts one of the best “nuts and bolts” governing moves of his time on the city council, along with raises for police and fire department employees.
“We closed a $7 million budget deficit without raising taxes,” Strickland said, adding that the city council was now faced with a similar dilemma ahead of an expected $8 million budget deficit.
Strickland was also mayor during the controversial settlement with the operators of the Pacific Airshow, which he says was his proudest achievement as mayor despite questions on how much money it makes the city and the city losing a lawsuit forcing them to show the settlement to the public.
The city’s also now facing a lawsuit and two ballot initiatives over their proposed restricted section in the library, which Strickland voted to support.
[Read: Surf City Continues Struggling Over the Future of Library]
New Proposals Face Strong Pushback
Throughout most of those moves, Strickland and other majority members faced strong pushback from public commenters, and the council’s three Democrat members.
Former Councilman Dan Kalmick, whose reelection bid failed last year, said Strickland and the rest of the majority have overly politicized what’re supposed to be non-partisan races and taken illegal aid from donors.
“They get to handpick who runs without any real discussion,” Kalmick said in a Wednesday interview. “I think corruption and bankruptcy will likely be their legacy.”
But Strickland pointed to Kalmick, along with former council members Natalie Moser and Rhonda Bolton, all losing their reelection bids in 2022 as signs that residents believe the current city council is on the right track, along with his clearing over 50% of the vote in the primary for his new seat in the state senate.
“Whoever shows up at city council is not representative of everyone in Huntington Beach,” Strickland said. “Richard Nixon once said there’s a silent majority out there.”
“If anyone should look in the mirror it’s the people who are our critics,” he continued. “They’ve been losing non-stop for the last three or four years.”
Kalmick pushed back on that, saying that their success wasn’t a sign of voters agreeing with them but that the average Huntington Beach voter is uninformed.
“I think our residents are pretty uninformed and polling shows that,” Kalmick said. “I don’t think the council was out of touch at all…councils used to be balanced because we had more newspapers and people that were more informed.”
Van Der Mark said the biggest legacy they leave behind is proof that the slate campaign can work in Huntington Beach.
“We were told by many people ‘don’t run together as a team,’” Van Der Mark said. “We told them this will work and the second time around we used the exact same method, the same blueprint for the second time and proved when we come together it’ll all work out.”
Strickland noted that he has “no input whatsoever” on who will be replacing him, but that he trusts the city council to make the right decision.
“I’m going to do whatever I can to help Huntington Beach,” Strickland said. “I’m so enthusiastic this city is better than when I came in.”
Noah Biesiada is a Voice of OC reporter and corps member with Report for America, a GroundTruth initiative. Contact him at nbiesiada@voiceofoc.org.
