Shasta county in northern California has completed one of the longest political reversals anywhere in the state. In 1932, just over 72% of its voters backed Franklin Delano Roosevelt for president. Today the county is considered the de facto Maga capital of California and a center of the US election denial movement, with roughly two-thirds of voters supporting Donald Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024.

A more-than-year-long examination of shasta county california politics, drawing on longtime residents, historians and political experts, has traced how the transformation unfolded across the 20th century.

Depression-era Shasta and Roosevelt's 1932 visit

When voters went to the polls in 1932, nearly a quarter of the US workforce was jobless, whatever officials said about the economy improving. In Shasta, founded in 1850 during the California gold rush and once a productive gold mining center, the collapse was severe. Before the Depression, the county had offered work in copper mining, agriculture and timber and seemed set to become a railroad hub.

The Sacramento Bee documented the desperation of the early 1930s. In early 1931, about 200 men scuffled in Sacramento over a handful of temporary jobs moving granite. People who lost housing camped along the banks of the Sacramento River and were, in some cases, near starvation.

In one Shasta mountain town, jobless men were accused of setting a blaze with the aim of being hired to extinguish it. One young prospector told a reporter in 1931 that he had dug out $18.90 in gold over a month - not riches, but enough to keep him fed.

Roosevelt campaigned in 41 states that year, making a point to visit small towns and rural areas. When his train stopped in Redding, the county seat, in September 1932, businesses closed and classes ended early so that everyone could see the New York governor's remarks.

Addressing a crowd of several thousand, he said the trip was not a political one but made to learn the conditions and needs of the country, and framed the contest as a fight against Republican leadership rather than the Republican party. That November he carried California, and Shasta backed him with just over 72% of the vote.

The New Deal that built loyalty

The loyalty proved durable. In the 20th century, Shasta residents chaired California's Democratic party, helped bring major infrastructure to the region and served in John F Kennedy's administration. Pat Carr, 82, of Cottonwood, keeps a photo of Roosevelt standing beside his grandfather Francis during the Redding visit; Carr's father and cousin managed Kennedy's Northern California campaign, and his uncle was Kennedy's undersecretary of the interior.

The engine of that loyalty was the Shasta Dam, a keystone of the Central Valley Project. Its scale is hard to overstate:

• •Built with 15m tons of concrete, 600ft tall, with a reservoir capable of holding back some 4.5m acre-feet of water.
• •It sends water from California's far north to drier Central Valley farmland and generates enough electricity to power as many as 710,000 homes.
• •A tour guide said the federal government considers the dam critical infrastructure at a level just below the White House and the Pentagon.

Richard Walker, a UC Berkeley professor emeritus and director of the Living New Deal project, said the dam was the county's most significant investment and one of the era's largest public works and most important hydroelectric facilities. He said New Deal work won over millions because of how it felt: "They felt that the government cared. Critically, they felt they participated."

Most of California's water sits in the north while 80% of the demand lies in the central and southern regions of the state. During the Depression the state could not afford the project until lobbying, including by Francis Carr, won Roosevelt administration funding. State senator John B McColl said in 1937, before construction began: "Things are more optimistic than ever before in [the] Central Valley. We are delighted with prospects of immediate work."

The dam provided thousands of badly needed jobs during its construction amid the Great Depression and through the second world war. It employed almost 5,000 people at one time, with construction under way 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and some workers received draft deferments during the war.

Federal programs reached well beyond the dam. Mere months after Roosevelt took office, Civilian Conservation Corps work camps were established in Shasta county, enlisting jobless young men to build campgrounds, cut firelines and construct fire lookouts. New Deal programs operated in virtually every US county, brought electricity to wide areas and funded Redding's fire station, post office, bridge and veterans memorial building.

Pat Carr remembers how the money connected to the party: "The money was flowing out of Washington into the north state, and the guys that were getting it done were all Democrats."

Roosevelt's first-term agenda had built a powerful coalition of labor unions, African Americans, the working class, liberal professionals and white southerners that anchored his party. Bob Mulholland, a veteran Democratic strategist and longtime northern California resident who spoke shortly before his death in 2025, said workers and their children carried that gratitude for years: "I think there was a certain amount of that commitment or thanks for years, from the workers themselves and the kids."

How the county turned red

The reported explanation for the reversal is a community that dramatically veered right amid the collapse of its major industries and became a hotbed for radical conservative politics. The second world war and surging postwar housing demand had brought significant growth to the timber industry, with ample mill and union jobs for loggers, retail clerks and bartenders.

Historian Harvey Kaye, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, notes that after the war the United States experienced the greatest economic boom in human history, with inequality declining. What followed, in Shasta's case, was the loss of those industrial foundations and the sharp rightward swing that researchers documented.

The modern county has drawn repeated attention:

• •Voters elected officials who promoted falsehoods about stolen elections and frequently clashed with the state.
• •During the pandemic, the area drew national attention for its hostility to Covid restrictions.
• •Recent turmoil included a journalist assaulted while covering a meeting of local conservative groups and a protester who faced jail time for holding a sign demanding an official's resignation.

The fight over voting itself

The transformation now reaches the ballot box. In June, Shasta voters approved Measure B, which would end nearly all voting by mail, require voter ID and mandate a hand count. A judge has blocked the measure from taking effect as the litigation moves ahead.

Meanwhile, a few residents work to preserve the county's forgotten Democratic record. Pat Carr has assembled what amounts to a private museum of photos and letters showcasing a mostly forgotten history of the region's deep blue past. He said people now find it hard to believe the area was once Democratic, adding: "Those of us that remember a heyday, we're almost all dead."

With Measure B blocked but the court fight continuing, the county's battle over voting itself remains unresolved.