With his second-place finish in California’s June primary, Northern California Republican state Sen. Brian Dahle won the right to challenge Gov. Gavin Newsom in the Nov. 8 general election.
His attempts to seek national attention have stirred speculation that he’s running a not-so-shadow campaign for president, though he denies having any interest in the White House and says he supports President Biden.Dahle is a conservative state senator from the tiny town of Bieber in the northeast corner of California. The 57-year-old legislator was on the Lassen County Board of Supervisors for 16 years before being elected to the California Legislature in 2012.
After high school, college wasn’t an option for Dahle or his three siblings, he said. The family had plenty of farmland but little money. He worked different jobs up and down the state, pulling chains in the local lumber mill, blasting rock to build hydroelectric plants and driving a bulldozer in an open-pit gold mine. He returned to the family farm in his mid-20s.
Winston Churchill has been credited with saying, “Never let a good crisis for to waste.” The Newsom administration took advantage of the pandemic to create Project Roomkey, which used vacant hotel and motel rooms as temporary shelter for homeless Californians. Roomkey led to an offering of more permanent housing through Project Homekey, which provided homes to 8,264 individuals in an initial round.
Environmentalists celebrated the passage of the climate bills but balanced their praise with criticism for Newsom’s decision to extend operations at the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in San Luis Obispo County. On his website, Dahle says that forest fires created more carbon emissions than all the cars on the road in 2020. The Republican candidate points to legislation he introduced to count wildfire emissions in the state’s plan to reduce carbon emissions.He argues that “climate change is not the primary cause of California’s recent super fires” and says the state’s misguided efforts have hindered the goal of a healthy environment.