Republicans in California are having a moment and two Sacramento-area assemblymembers are at the center of it all. November’s election results expanded the Republican legislative caucuses and validated many Republican positions validated by voters through ballot initiatives. This followed a legislative session where Joe Patterson of Rocklin and Josh Hoover of Folsom shone. They picked and won good legislative fights through superior messaging and coalition building and they were driving forces in the electoral success.
A few years ago, Patterson was a Rocklin city councilman who spent all his time on social media articulating conservative ideas.
Now, in his second term in the Assembly, Patterson spends just as much time on social media but finds time to legislate as well. Last term, he got an astounding 15 bills to the governor’s desk, 10 of which were signed into law. He was handily re-elected by me and my neighbors with 58.8% of the vote. As a conservative, I usually cringe thinking that more laws were enacted. But Patterson’s ideas are reasonable and unintrusive. This term, he is trying to tackle something for me: banning the use of nondisclosure agreements in legislative negotiations (a practice that should already be illegal and is corrupt beyond belief). Patterson is a household name in Rocklin. At Jessup University, where I spent the past two years getting an masters in business administration, he was known and liked by seemingly everyone. He even won over my classmate, the president of his homeowners’ association, against whom Patterson had waged war on X. Patterson’s dogged messaging on criminal justice issues in particular helped pave the way for a stunning success on the ballot. Proposition 36, which sought to curb fentanyl abuse and retail theft, was approved by voters by a more than two-to-one margin. It won in every county in California after a more than decade-long effort to roll back penalties for so-called lesser offenses like property and drug crimes.
I don’t want to overstate how influential the 42-year-old Patterson was in Prop. 36’s success, because success has many parents, but he spent two years shaping news coverage of criminal justice issues and exposed flaws in many soft-on-crime arguments. As The Bee wrote in its endorsement of him: “Republicans like Patterson found vulnerability within majority party Democrats whose rigid liberal ideology rejected Senate Bill 14, which asked an important question: Shouldn’t child sex trafficking be classified in California as a serious felony? Former Assembly Public Safety chair Reggie Jones-Sawyer and others embarrassed themselves by blocking a floor vote on this question until Newsom and new Speaker Robert Rivas intervened.” It’s rare to find a Republican effective on both X and inside the building since the former is rewarded by provocation while the latter relies on collegiality, but Patterson strikes the right balance. In contrast to Patterson’s outspokenness, Hoover shines behind the scenes. Hoover, now 36, was first elected in 2022 by knocking off a formidable Democratic incumbent by just shy of 1,400 votes (two of which were from my household). The narrow margin of victory and purple politics of the district catapulted Hoover to the top of the list of the Legislature’s most vulnerable.
His hard-fought victory in 2022 suggested a strong work ethic and his significant victory in 2024 proved that it wasn’t a fluke. This time, he won by beat The Bee’s endorsed candidate by close to 16,000 votes. The Bee endorsed Hoover’s opponent, then-Citrus Heights Mayor Porsche Middleton, because she was a “remarkable talent.” I guess Hoover’s talent was remarkabler. Hoover’s political success would be far less meaningful if not for his legislative success. He championed a bipartisan law restricting the use of cellphones in K-12 classrooms and an audit of some of the state’s anti-homelessness programs. The cellphone bill did teachers and parents a favor. My two toddlers fight me constantly for my phone (so they can take pictures of the ground and scroll through my notifications) and I can’t imagine the same fight with a teenager. Meanwhile, the audit Hoover helped secure showed that the state had been tracking neither the spending of billions of dollars nor the effectiveness of multiple anti-homelessness programs. Hoover introduced a necessary legislative fix that sailed through the Legislature with no opposition, which would have required ongoing tracking and reporting of program outcomes. While the spending accountability bill was ultimately vetoed, the nearly complete lack of opposition to it and the cellphone bill showcased Hoover’s ability to bring people together. In a recent blog post, Hoover said that he would soon be introducing more legislation on homelessness accountability.
It’s impossible to know what the future holds for either Patterson or Hoover. Things change, people change, but just their initial terms in office modeled success for Republican lawmakers.