Two years after Greg Wallis eked out a bare 85-vote victory over Christy Holstege to gain the position of Assemblyman in the 47th District, a rematch will determine whether the post will remain in Republican hands or switch to Democratic control.
Looking at the statistics, it would appear that the contest this year will be a dead heat, just as it was in 2022. In that race, both received very close to 50 percent of the vote, as Wallis polled 84,752 or 50.025 percent to Holstege’s 84,667 or 49.975 percent. Of the 315,361 voters in the district as of July 5, 2024, 125,532 or 39.81 percent were registered Democrats and 107,231 or 34 percent were registered Republicans. The remaining 10.9 percent are members of the American Independent, Green, Libertarian Peace & Freedom or other more obscure parties. The district straddles San Bernardino and Riverside counties, with the greater number of voters in the latter. Riverside County is home to 241,397 of the 47th Assembly District’s voters. The other 73,964 voters reside in San Bernardino County. Within the San Bernardino County portion of the 47th District, registered Republicans outnumber Democrats, 32,481 to 21,194. In Riverside County, however, Democrats outnumber Republicans 104,338 to 274,750. So, though the Democrats enjoy a numerical advantage in terms of registered voters, that edge will not necessarily translate into victory for Holstege, given that Republicans in general evince 7 percent to 8 percent greater voter turnout than do Democrats.
Holstege, nevertheless, has grounds to be confident about the November outcome, given that in the March Primary this year, Wallis did not garner a majority of the vote, as he received 48.6 percent of the vote – 58,312 voter endorsements, while Holstege was fending off another Democrat in the three-way race. She captured close to the number of votes that Wallis had, 55,677 or 46.4 percent, while Jamie Swain brought in 6,115 votes or 5.1 percent. In this way, in the March Primary match, voters showed a 51.5 percent to 48.6 percent preference for a Democrat over a Republican.
Looking at the race in terms of the classic but hackneyed and trite Democrat/progressive vs. Republican/conservative contrast, it turns out that Holstege more readily fits the mold of her party identity than does Wallis fit the preconceptions about his party. Despite assertions made during the campaign two years ago that Wallis was a right wing extremist, his two years in office, although devoid of any serious legislative accomplishments, demonstrated him to be more of a centrist Republican. That contrasts with Holstege, who, if anything, hews toward the more extreme element of the liberal identifier.
California’s 47th Assembly District seat will be decided this year in the General Election on Nov. 5. Assembly members serve two-year terms and play a key role in shaping state laws on healthcare, education, public safety and the environment while assisting in overseeing the state budget.
The 47th District covers Banning, Beaumont, Calimesa, Cathedral City, Desert Hot Springs, Indian Wells, La Quinta, Yucaipa, Palm Springs, Palm Desert, Rancho Mirage and San Jacinto in Riverside County and Yucca Valley, Yucaipa, Redlands and Highland in San Bernardino County.
Wallis, the incumbent, falls basically within the mainstream of the GOP, sounding indistinguishable from roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of the members of the Republican legislative delegation in Sacramento.
In that regard, he highlights reducing taxes as his highest continuing priority if he is retained as the Assemblyman in the 27th District. This, he insists, is not meant as a sop to industry and business, but rather as something that will reduce the rising cost of living that is impinging upon everyday individuals and families. “My constituents are hardworking and are still falling further and further behind,” he said. “My goal is to have then regain economic security and make goods more affordable. We need to stop reckless government spending that causes inflation so that your prices will go down again. I will put more money in your pocket by stopping the billions of new taxes Sacramento.”
Wallis said, “I am committed to eliminating the gas tax.”
This was something of a problematic gesture, however, as the entire state’s highway system has grown dependent on that form of revenue. Moreover, Wallis pronounced, he would be able to effectuate the elimination of the gas tax because of the state’s $73 billion budget surplus.
Over the last year and a half, however, Governor Gavin Newsom has learned that the anticipated $73 billion surplus, because of unexpected challenges is actually a $68 billion deficit.
Wallis nonetheless maintains California is in a position to offer “the biggest tax cut in state history.”
Wallis sounds like a mainstream Republican in his promise to “streamline regulations. By eliminating unnecessary regulations, which drive up costs for not only the business sector and households, we can boost the economy. We need to decomplexify the business licens application process to create more business opportunity and foster job creation and spur economic growth.
Likewise, on the issue of law and order, Wallis came across as a committed Republican.
“We need to fight the defund the police crowd tooth and nail. Nothing is more dangerous than reducing the number of police on our streets while violent crime increases,” he said. We can no longer let violent felons out of prison early. If we need more space in prison to keep violent felons off the streets then we need to open more prisons, or stop closing the ones we are in the process of shutting down. We should put the victim first again by restoring tough penalties for violent and property crimes so that criminals know there is a price to be paid if they want to harm you or steal your property. I will advocate for stricter measures regarding the release of individuals from correctional facilities who pose a threat to public safety.”
Wallis goes right down the line with his party on the issue of parental notification with regard to students who are maintaining one gender identity at home while undergoing a transition to another gender while in school and in the classroom. He supports allowing school officials to disclose to parents when that is the case. If the faculty at a school where a student attends is following an agenda which allows those in attendance to engage in such secrecy, Wallis indicated, the parents should be free to remove their children from that school.
“We must give parents the power to move their children to better schools if their current school is not the right fit,” he said. “Providing options will encourage schools to improve and cater to the diverse needs of our students.”
Educators who allow transgenderism to flourish on school campuses without involving parents in that element of their children’s lives are not bettering society, Wallis opined.
“When our K-12 schools fail, it is our students—especially those already facing challenges—who suffer the consequences,” he said. “This is simply unacceptable and requires change. We should make it easy for parents to get students out of failing schools and into good public or charter schools. Parents should have more of a voice in what students are taught and more information about how their school is doing compared to other schools.”
Despite his adherence to that socially conservative value system, with regard to another element of the state-funded public education system, Wallis sounded more like a unionist Democrat than a Republican.
“We should pay teachers like our future depends on them, because it does,” he said. “We need to reform tenure so that we can reward good teachers and retrain or dismiss bad ones. I support fast-track programs for new teachers, to ensure they are equipped with what they need to succeed from day one. I am committed to reducing student debt for teachers who dedicate themselves to serving in disadvantaged communities, helping us attract and retain passionate educators. Schools should receive every dollar they need in the classroom. I will advocate for redirecting funding to prioritize classroom resources while reducing excessive growth in local and state administration costs. We should send our available education funding to where it matters most—our students’ education.”
Wallis called for a “bipartisan approach” in “making our schools safe zones where gangs, drugs, and weapons are prohibited, and our students are kept safe.”
With regard to energy policy, Wallis came across, at least with regard to one aspect of the issue, as equally progressive as any Democrat in the Golden State.
“California should open the floodgates to clean, green energy,” he said, and “provide incentives for green energy companies of every kind to relocate to California and let them provide good paying
jobs and compete for our business while we wean ourselves off fossil fuels. We should take a stand as the national and global leaders that we are on climate change.”
In the same breath, however, he trod onto problematic ground that historically led to expensive experiences with regard to a form of energy production, that being the shutdown and decommissioning of the San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant in Orange County.
“We should reopen our nuclear power plants in isolated parts of the state, with a plan for disposing of the small amounts of hazardous waste that they generate,” Wallis said. The San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant south of San Clemente operated from 1968 until 2012, at which point premature wear was found on more than 3,000 tubes in replacement steam generators. While the plan successfully operated for more than a generation, providing electricity to a substantial portion of Orange and San Diego counties, the expense and complication of the decommissioning represents a current financial burden on its main operatiors, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric Company, as they deal with highly complex and controversial issue of disposing of the extremely toxic nuclear waste from the plant currently stored in dry casks on-site.
California’s one other nuclear plant, located in Diablo Canyon in San Luis Obispo County, has been operational since 1985. It produces about 18,000 gigawatts of electricity annually, equal to 8.6 percent of California’s total electricity generation and 23 percent of its carbon-free generation. Nevertheless, its construction was subject to a tremendous degree of controversy, not the least of which relates to its vulnerability to the seismic disturbances, predominantly that represented by the Hosgri Fault, located 10 miles away offshore which experience a 7.1 Richter Scale earthquake in 1927. The vulnerability to the Hosgri Fault seismic instability was discovered after the plans for the plant were drawn up, at which point the plans were altered with structural supports to prevent damage to the plant during an earthquake. While one of those supports was installed properly beneath and around the plant’s first reactor, the construction crew, which was supposed to install the supports around the second reactor in a configuration pattern 180 degrees opposite of the pattern used for the first, installed the supports in the same configuration as it had previously. This has led to considerable concern about the integrity of the plant if it were to be subjected to an intense earthquake. There was a massive protest in September 1981 with regard to the building of the facility, which was designed in 1968 and constructed at various points throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. More than 1,400 protesters were arrested at that time. There is continuing concern that the expense and danger of dealing with the eventual shutdown and decommissioning of the plant will equal or exceed the experience with the San Onofre Plant.
With regard to the housing crisis facing California, Wallis sounds like a blend of a Republican and a Democrat, in that he is in favor of liberalized development regulations which will allow landowners, developers and contractors to dispense with much of the land use and planning regulations that have grown more sophisticated and complicated and stifling in the last 50 to 60 years. This will make things more profitable for the developers, which is a position long assumed by Republicans but it will also facilitate the construction of more and more housing, which is a position recently embraced by the Democrats.
“I will push for measures that simplify and expedite the construction of new homes,” Wallis said. “By incentivizing developers to build affordable housing, we can ensure that everyone has access to safe and affordable places to live.”
As to the quasi-related issue of homelessness, Wallis proposed “establishing more shelters in suitable neighborhoods to provide immediate relief for those on the streets. We must expand access to mental health and substance abuse treatment facilities, offering support for individuals who are struggling. We need to require each city to have about the same number of clean, safe shelter beds as they do homeless people. We should put services and help available there, on-site and then prohibit outdoor camping.”
Wallis is highly critical of the Democratic majority in California State Government. He has both stated directly and implied that Democrats have taken advantage of their supermajority status in both houses of the legislature and control of not only the governor’s office and the California Attorney General’s Office but other state constitutional offices to engage in lawlessness and out-and-out criminal violations.
He cited “$31 billion in fraudulent unemployment claims” which he said the Democratic administration was guilty of tolerating, fostering and granting. “This was happening,” he said, “while Californians, unemployed because of COVID, couldn’t get the money they needed to buy groceries or pay the rent. The Democrats do not care about wasting your money. My solution is to require a public, nonpartisan audit of every department’s spending and effectiveness every year. We should put all state spending on line, in real time, on an easy to use website. Most importantly, we should prosecute elected officials and government workers who use taxpayer money as
their own private piggy bank, staying at fancy hotels and eating at expensive restaurants while we pick up the tab.”
Wallis said he is far better equipped to deal with both Republicans and Democrats in a bipartisan manner than Holstege.
“We need to reach across the aisle and figure out where we have common ground and focus on getting those things done. I am a member of the legislature’s Bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus. Good ideas come from lots of different kinds of people, and we limit solutions when we ignore or attack people just because of the “R” or “D” behind their names.”
As a too-proud Democrat, Holstege is “unable to work with opposing viewpoints to find common ground,” Wallis said. “If you want someone who has been proven to listen, who accepts new ideas no matter who has them, and works toward actual solutions, I’m the candidate you are looking for.”
Wallis has claimed the endorsements of Desert Hot Springs Mayor Scott Matas, Cathedral City Mayor Mark Carnevale, Cathedral City Councilwoman Nancy Ross, Palm Desert councilwoman Jan Harnik, Palm Desert Councilwoman Gina Nestande, Palm Desert Councilman Evan Trubee, Indian Wells Mayor Greg Sanders, Indian Wells Councilmember Dana Reed, Indian Wells Councilwoman Donna Griffith, La Quinta Mayor Linda Evans, La Quinta Councilman John Peña, La Quinta Councilwoman Deborah McGarrey, La Quinta Councilman Steve Sanchez, Yucca Valley Mayor Robert Lombardo, Yucca Valley Councilman Jim Schooler, Calimesa Mayor Bill Davis, Calimesa Councilwoman Linda Molina, the Peace Officers Research Association of California, California Professional Firefighters, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, the California Police Chiefs Association, the San Bernardino County Safety Employees’ Benefit Association, the Desert Hot Springs Police Officer’s Association, the Southwest Mountain States Regional Council of Carpenters and Beaumont Councilwoman Jessica Voigt.
Christy Holstege prides herself as being at the forefront of the social transitioning which she says is taking America into the future.
Her political status arises from her mayoralty of Palm Springs, which has the distinction of having a city council composed entirely of members of the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Bi-sexual Transsexual Queer (LGBTQ) community.
Married to a man and the mother of a child, Holstege emphasizes nonetheless that she is bisexual and a victim of rape.
“I am a sexual assault survivor,” she has asserted, not quite proudly, not quite angrily but firmly and with just a hint of hostility.
A primary theme of Holstege’s political approach is, she has said, “fighting binary labels.” She says she has overcome her hostility toward men that was a consequence of her experience being raped. Nevertheless, she says, she is especially dedicated to upholding the rights of women. “For me, LGBTQ rights and women’s rights together represent gender justice,” she said.
Previously, Holstege said, she was lionized as an enlightened heterosexual who had advocated vociferously against Proposition 8, a 2008 initiative which called for the banning of same-sex marriage. That was because, she said, she was married to a man. In 2014, however, she felt compelled to cast off the heterosexual label and tell the world that she was bisexual.
She makes no bones about standing for making fluid sexuality as American as apple pie.
Holstege says that bisexuals are the most easily forgotten and overlooked component of the LGBTQ community, something she claims gives her an added degree of sensitivity when it comes to what was in the past referred to as alternative lifestyles, which she says are now coming more and more into the mainstream. Without saying, precisely, how she knows or was able to do the tally, Holstege said she is one of only six bisexual elected officials in the United States.
Despite all the attention her position as the spearhead of social change has garnered, Holstege said the voters of the 47th District should not forget or ignore that she represents, with regard to other political issues at stake in the current election season, a superior electoral choice to Wallis.
She said she is “committed to making housing more affordable.” She has better ideas than her opponent when it comes to spurring economic growth, she maintains. As importantly for the future of all Californians, she said, she is alive to the threat of climate change, while Wallis is a denier. “I will safeguard the environment,” she said. The desert area that comprises the 47th District has been, she said, “devastated” by climate change, which has resulted in “extreme weather events as well as increased air pollution. Areas of our district are experiencing higher rates of asthma and other health issues. Addressing the climate crisis must be a top priority if we are to protect the health and well-being of our residents. I intend to accelerate our transition to renewable energy by pushing for investments in solar, wind, and other clean energy sources. In the Assembly, I will advocate for renewable energy and stronger environmental protections to reduce air pollution.”
She is more capable of effectuating the change that matters to the constituents of the 47th District, Holstege said.
Holstege tied the need to “make housing affordable and attainable for everyone” directly to the reduction of homelessness. “Housing affordability is one of the most urgent issues facing our district,” she said, emphasizing that she has practical experience in dealing with the issue. “As Mayor of Palm Springs, I worked to approve hundreds of units of affordable housing, invested millions of dollars in new developments, and secured $10 million in state funding for innovative housing and homelessness services, including championing the first and only homeless navigation center in the region, provide wraparound services and crisis assistance for those experiencing homelessness with over 80 transitional housing units.”
She represents a far more practical approach to creating economic development from the bottom up, helping those who need it most, than the cynical tactics of the Republicans who are advocates of top down, trickle-down economics. She said that after the district’s voters send her to Sacramento, “I will work tirelessly to create stable, well-paying jobs by investing in key industries that are essential to our region,” she said. She said that sectors of the economy most important to that portion of Riverside and San Bernardino counties she is vying to represent are “renewable energy, healthcare, and tourism.”
She said she will ensure that programs which provide healthcare, social services, and education will remain robust.
Holstege is the daughter and granddaughter of lawyers. She attended and graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara and then obtained a law degree from Stanford Law School. She was admitted to the bar in 2012.
Perhaps because of her experience as a rape victim, Holstege became passionate about reproductive rights. While at Standord, she founded Stanford Law Students for Reproductive Justice. She has been a board member of both Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund.
She is a person of substance, while her opponent is a lightweight, Holstege said.
“My background as a civil rights attorney and Mayor of Palm Springs sets me apart from my opponent,” she said. Wallis is caught up in his own interests, while she has gone to bat for others, the less fortunate, in her role as a lawyer but also in her capacity as Palm Springs mayor, she said. “I’ve represented hundreds of local residents on issues that deeply affect their lives,” she said. “I have proven myself by delivering results for our community as mayor, from addressing homelessness to expanding healthcare and social services. My track record of delivering results is grounded in a commitment to putting people first. While in office, I led the city through the COVID-19 crisis, passed pro-housing policies, invested in green energy, and created jobs with living wages.”
In comparison, Holstege says, Wallis has no legislative accomplishments to speak of and hasn’t been attentive enough to his duty as an Assemblyman to vote on a significant percentage of bills brought forth by others.
“He has missed 478 votes,” Holstege said of Wallis.
That Wallis has proven ineffective as an advocate for the wrongheaded causes he believes in as a Republican is of little consolation, Holstege said, given the votes he has made against progressive legislation.
“He has refused to support common-sense gun legislation and received a zero percent score from the Sierra Club,” Holstege pointed out.
Holstege, noting that the majority of those living in the 47th District are forward-looking progressives who, in the language of Kamala Harris-Tim Walz campaign “are not going back,” said, “My opponent does not represent our values.”
Any comparison between her accomplishments and the do-nothingness Wallis exhibits, Holstege said, why she should be in the Assembly rather than him.
“I don’t make empty promises,” Holstege said. “I have consistently delivered results.”
In office, Holstege said, she will “invest in mental health infrastructure, build affordable housing, prosecute fentanyl dealers, help local businesses create jobs that pay a living wage, combat climate change, rein in the rising costs of groceries, gasoline and rent. I weill ensure fast emergency response from our critical public safety service providers. I will bring a Cal State campus to Riverside County.
In addition to be supported by her husband, Adam and their son, Aden, Holstedge has the endorsements of Congressman Robert Garcia, Congresswoman Katie Porter, Congressman Raul Ruiz, M.D., Congressman Mark Takano, California Senate President Pro Tem Emeritus Toni G. Atkins, State Senator Angelique Ashby, State Senator María Elena Durazo, State Senator Lena Gonzalez, State Senator Steve Padilla, State Senator Susan Rubio, State Senator, Susan Talamantes Eggman, State Senator Scott Weiner, Speaker of the Assembly Robert Rivas, Assembly Speaker Emeritus Anthony Rendon and Assembly Members Dawn Addis, Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, Steve Bennett, Isaac Bryan, Lisa Calderon, Juan Carrillo, Sabrina Cervantes, Laura Freedman, Jesse Gabriel, Eloise Gómez-Reyes, Corey Jackson, Alex Lee, Evan Low, Josh Lowenthal, Tina McKinner, Liz Ortega, Gail Pellerin, Chris Ward, Carlos Villapadua, Buffy Wicks, Rick Chavez Zbur, Pilar Schlavo, Avelino Valencia, Luz Rivas and Cottie Petrie-Norris.