Big Bear Lake Councilman Randall Putz has confidently tossed his hat into the ring to succeed District 34 Assemblyman Tom Lackey, who will be termed out of the California legislature when his current term ends in 2026.
Putz’s hope that he can convince the voters of the district, which stretches across swathes of San Bernardino, Los Angeles and Kern counties, to send him to Sacramento to represent them contrasts with multiple phases of political reality, not the least of which is that his base represents only slightly more than one percent of the entirety of the district’s population. Moreover, outside the eastern San Bernardino Mountain communities, Putz has at best limited name recognition in the San Bernardino County portion of the Assembly district and is entirely foreign to the district’s voters in Los Angeles and Kern counties.
Beyond that, Putz, a lifelong Republican in a one of the few areas within California where Republicans yet predominate, inexplicably recently changed his party affiliation to Democrat. Within the 34th Assembly District, 44.49 percent of the  247,249 voters are Republicans and 27.7 percent are registered Democrats, with 4.82 percent belonging to the American Independent, Peace & Freedom, Green, Libertarian and other more obscure parties and 22.58 having no party preference.
In 2022, when the district was redrawn pursuant to the ten-year reapportionment/redistricting that followed the 2020 Census combining sections of what had formerly been the 36th District and 33rd District, Lackey, a retired career Highway Patrol Officer and Assembly incumbent representing the former 36th District since 2014 was thrown into a match against another Republican, then-33rd Assembly District incumbent Thurston Smith, who had been in office just a single term at that point. In that race, Lackey took home a 56.5 percent to 43. 5 percent victory, based largely on Lackey’s name recognition advantage over Smith with the voters in Los Angeles and Kern counties.
In that match-up, Smith within the San Bernardino County portion of the 34th District outpolled Lackey, garnering  35,676, or 52.39 percent of the 69,092 votes cast on the easternmost side of the district to Lackey’s 32,415 votes or 47.61 percent.
In Los Angeles and Kern counties, however, Smith, whose claim to political fame consisted of his eight years on the Hesperia City Council including two years as mayor, a short stint as a member of the Mojave Water Agency Board of Directors and his single term as a member of the California Assembly, was a virtually unknown commodity.
On the 34th District’s west and northwest side within Los Angeles and Kern counties, Lackey earned 31,425 or 71.53  percent of 43,931 votes cast there to Smith’s 12,506 votes or 28.47 percent.
When 2024 rolled around, Smith, fully conscious that not only were the numbers still against him but that Lackey held vaunted standing within the GOP, did not vie to return to the Assembly. That year, both the March open primary contest for the two top 34th Assembly District run-off positions in the November election and then the November General Election were limited to Lackey and Democrat Ricardo Ortega. Lackey gave Ortega a 65.71 percent-to-34.29 percent thrashing in March and then trounced him in the November contest  63.36 percent to 36.64 percent.
Meanwhile, Smith was biding his time, knowing that following Lackey’s 2024-to-2026 term, his sixth as a member of California’s lower legislative house, Lackey under California’s term limits could not run again, clearing the way for his re-entry into the statehouse.
The vision of Smith and his supporters, however, has been clouded by developments beyond their control, both on the west and northwest end of the 34th District and at the level of the statewide GOP. This exists in the personage and ambition of  Charles Hughes, a member of the Antelope Valley Union High School District Board of Trustees and a retired U.S. Navy veteran and California Department of Corrections lieutenant. Hustling hard, Hughes captured not only Lackey’s endorsement but that of California Assembly Caucus. i.e., 18 of the current 19  current Republican members the Assembly. Additionally, Hughes made a show of how intent he is on succeeding Lackey by collecting more than one quarter of a million in donations into his campaign war chest by June of this year.
While Smith and his support network, which extends to the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee and most of its members, are not, exactly, giving up, they recognize that they have a Herculean task before them that is going to require a well-oiled-and-maintained political machine firing on all eight cylinders. This approach means that Smith must succeed in capturing the vast majority of Republican votes on the San Bernardino side of the district, a fair smattering of the Democrat votes on the San Bernardino side of the district and that he has to make a better showing against Hughes in Los Angeles and Kern counties in 2026 than he did against Lackey in 2022. That is for Smith a difficult strategy in the face of Hughes’ showing of fundraising capability that will allow him to run an aggressive campaign, but one that is achievable. An assumption, however, was that no third candidate was going to get into the action and split the San Bernardino County vote with Smith.
Putz’s emergence as a candidate has really gummed up the works for Smith and the Republicans in San Bernardino County who feel that they should be the beneficiaries of their region’s Republican plurality and that one of their own – a San Bernardino County Republican – should be representing the 34th District in Sacramento, not someone from Los Angeles County, which currently is home to 25 of the California Assembly’s 80 members.
The anger at Putz among San Bernardino County Republicans is palpable. His motivation, for them, is simultaneously incomprehensible, absurd and enraging. For his abandonment of the Republican Party, he is perceived as a turncoat. As a Democrat, by virtually any handicapping yardstick that might be applied, his chances of winning are infinitesimal. If Ortega runs again, having two Democrats in the race would compound the odds against him. Putz’s limited base – consisting primarily of the 5,044 inhabitants of Big Bear Lake and the city’s 2,804 voters – when gauged against the 34th Assembly District’s 466,780 population and 247,249 registered voters, severely compromises his electoral viability. Four years ago, Putz’s Big Bear Lake City Council colleague, Rick Herrick, provided an illustration of the futility that surrounds Putz’s council run when he sought, unsuccessfully to capture the 33rd Assembly District seat in the last election before the merging of portions of the 33rd and 36th districts into the 34th. Herrick, a Republican in what was the equally-heavily Republican 33rd found himself at a disadvantage to Smith, who hails from Hesperia, which at that time had a population of 99,818, virtually 20 times that of Big Bear Lake. The question many want to ask Putz is this: If the Republican Herrick from Big Bear Lake could not beat Smith in the Republican-heavy 33rd District, how now does the Democrat Putz think he can beat either Smith or Hughes in the Republican-heavy 34th District, when nearly 39 percent of the voters in the district reside in Los Angeles and Kern counties?
To a vast number of the San Bernardino County Republicans focused on questions of governance and politics extending to the struggle between the two major parties that has been going on in Sacramento since shortly after California became a state, Putz is a traitor whose true aim is to serve as a spoiler who is working to ensure that a good portion of San Bernardino County consisting of the major part of its mountain communities and a good part of its desert is represented by a politician who is closer to Los Angeles than he is to San Bernardino.
Putz acknowledges none of that, and he blithely celebrates himself as a new breed of bipartisan politician, who is seeking to rise above the bickering of the Democratic/Republican divide.
As what was once a seemingly dyed-in-the-wool Republican who has swung leftward into being a Democrat, Putz suggests
A former Republican turned Democrat, Putz said he has a unique perspective on serving the 18,000-square-mile 34th District, which includes all of Bear Valley, as well rural areas of San Bernardino and portions of Kern and Los Angeles counties.
He is less focused on what is dividing Republicans from Democrats, Putz insists, than the issues of importance to the mountain-and-desert-dwelling population of the 34th District, people who live in an environment that is more rustic and rural than urban. He is one of the “Good Country People,” as someone such as Flannery O’Connor might have put it, rather than one of those city slickers. He’ll be the voice of the redheaded and neglected countrified folk, California’s forgotten stepchildren, when he gets to Sacramento, according to Putz.
“I’m a fighter,” according to Putz. “I feel a deep obligation to use my experience and abilities to serve the people of Assembly District 34. We need to make sure our voices are heard, resources come our way, we move forward together, and build the future our region needs and deserves. For the past 25 years, I have lived, worked, and built my life in this region. I’ve spent 16 years in local and regional government leadership, solving problems and working with people from all walks of life to get things done. Now, I want to take that experience to Sacramento to fight for our fair share and bring meaningful change to our district.”
Despite having reinvented himself as a Democrat, Putz sometimes has difficulty unbinding himself from his Republican roots. He owns a niche retail establishment that caters to bird lovers, selling bird feeders, bird seed and related merchandise. As an entrepreneur himself, he has an especial sensitivity to the things that make a business work, the red tape and regulation or over-regulation that can make a business fail and the challenges in the private sector, an orientation that has led him to serve, as a member of the city council who was elevated for a time to the appointed mayor’s spot, as a voice for the business community in Big Bear. In Big Bear, the business community is, in major measure, the tourism industry, including some highly profitable out-of-state corporations. In this way, Putz’s personal and political identity is wrapped up in the advancement of business interests, those of his own and those of others, of small mom-and-pop retail or service providers, mid-size operations or corporate behemoths. When issues before the Big Bear Lake City Council that involved balancing the profitability of a business against the quality of life of residents, Putz on more than one occasion sided with those who had invested or risked money to make money. In this way, his conversion into a Democrat is not entirely convincing. He has spoken about preserving nature and land and the wilderness, which in the 34th District means the forest and the desert. Still, in those instances where business interests come into direct conflict with the conservation of land and the protection of the species that live upon it, such as when development is to occur on property occupied by desert tortoises (Gopherus agassizii or Joshua trees (yucca brevifolia) or Mohave ground squirrels (Xerospermophilus mohavensis) or bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis) or San Bernardino bluegrass (Poa Atropurpurea) or California dandelion (Taraxacum californicum) or Johnston’s rock-cress (rabis johnstonii) or Bear Valley sandwort (Arenaria ursina) or as-grey Indian paittbrush (Castillegja cinerea) or southern mountain wild buckwheat (Eriogonum kennedyi var. austromontanum) or Hidden Lake bluecurls (Trichostema austromontnum ssp. compactum), Putz has retroceded, backing off or backpedaling from the characteristic Democratic endorsement of strict environmental protection or ecological prioritization, suggesting that “common sense” or “realistic” principles should be applied so that some order of compromise between on one end the developmental imperative, the expansion of a ski lodge/resort or a moneymaking venture and on the other end the protection of the environment can be effectuated.
Interestingly, while he has donned the identity and outer trappings of a Democrat and even though this aligns him with the party that has a supermajority in both houses of the legislature and which occupies every constitutional office in California’s state government from governor at the top down through lieutenant governor, state attorney general, state controller, secretary of state, state treasurer, superintendent of schools and insurance commissioner, he yet decries his new party’s dominance, which is leading at least some to question whether his political transformation is a genuine one, whether he is actually on the Democratic Team, whether he is malingering and is a Republican agent who is trying to insinuate himself into the Democratic ranks or if he is merely engaged in an effort to advance himself electorally.
Of the system in Sacramento where his new party has control, Putz offers the assessment that “It’s broken. Our democracy thrives on balance—balance of power, balance of ideas, balance in solving problems that impact the lives of everyday Californians. But for years, we have drifted further from that balance, slipping into deeper polarization, resentment, and disengagement. Extreme politics, media bubbles, and divisive algorithms are keeping us stuck. And yet, despite these challenges, we remain one of the longest-standing democracies in the world. That is something worth fighting for.”
He continued, “Pegging people on one side or another is a big part of our problem. No one is all red. No one is all blue. We are all a little purple. The extreme political swings of recent years have only served to stall progress, deepen divisions, and make governing harder. It’s time to restore balance. We need to move away from the unhealthy extremes and return to reasonable compromise—where real solutions are found. The current culture of polarization is manufactured for selfish gain, and in the end, it’s the people who lose. I will work to find common ground, bridge divides, and focus on what unites us rather than what separates us. We need to turn off the noise, step away from social media outrage, and get back to governing with purpose.”
He will be both an old fashioned and a new age politician from here on out, Putz vowed.
“I will work to ensure our region gets the resources it needs, that we solve problems in a bipartisan way, and that we make real progress,” he said. “I will keep lines of communication open, check in with the people I serve, and ensure that policy decisions reflect the realities on the ground.
Putz took aim at the enemy of the people – the press – whom he accused of utilizing disingenuous means such as artificial intelligence to try to fool them by telling them what to think.
“It’s time to move beyond the distractions, break free from the grip of media algorithms and talking heads, and reconnect with the real needs of our communities,” he said. “Because good governance starts with being present, engaged, and accountable. And that is exactly the kind of leadership I will bring to the State Assembly.”
Putz said his formula for success as a politician is to “listen, unite [and] serve. Good leadership starts with listening. Too many people feel unheard and unseen by their government, and I want to change that. I will work to increase civic participation and ensure that all voices—especially those different from my own—are heard and considered with empathy and respect. Listening is not just a task to complete; it’s the foundation of strong representation. I have always made it a priority to meet with anyone who wants to talk, to gather data, and to stay connected with my community. Because when people feel heard, they engage. And when they engage, we build a stronger, more effective government. Governing isn’t about rhetoric—it’s about action. I believe in rolling up my sleeves and making things happen. I will work to ensure our region gets the resources it needs, that we solve problems in a bipartisan way, and that we make real progress. I will keep lines of communication open, check in with the people I serve, and ensure that policy decisions reflect the realities on the ground.”
-Mark Gutglueck