Robert Luna to become L.A. County sheriff as Alex Villanueva concedes defeat
If you weren’t aware of Alex Villanueva’s bid for the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, then perhaps you missed something.
It is clear that when he was running his campaign for sheriff in 2010, the man who now faces County Board President L.A. County Sheriff Alex Villanueva for the Democratic nomination for sheriff was never really on the ballot.
What was on the ballot was someone else.
That someone else was John Callahan, who had become the Republican Party candidate in the June 16 Democratic primary election for sheriff. When he entered the race, the Republican Party didn’t know if Callahan was an independent, a candidate for sheriff, or something else entirely.
The party decided he was a candidate for sheriff and gave him $1,000 for his candidacy. He then paid $100 a month for his campaign, $25 for his campaign manager and $2,500 for his campaign fund-raising coordinator, according to records obtained by the Los Angeles Times.
The party began to wonder if he was doing all this to win. They decided to send a questionnaire to Callahan’s campaign managers and they told them things had become a little uncomfortable. They decided to send them back.
So when Villanueva made his acceptance speech, saying, “I am thrilled to be the candidate for sheriff of the most highly respected and most financially successful department in the county,” he had a chance to show that he was someone other than the Republican Party candidate for sheriff.
One of the questions in the questionnaire that the Republican Party was asking was, “What is your background?” When they answered this question, it turns out, they revealed that they believed that he was a candidate for sheriff.
When he made his acceptance speech, he acknowledged he was going to win the election, but then he went on to say that he was going to be more of a supporter of the sheriff than a candidate for sheriff.
Then Villanueva announced that, in addition to being the sheriff’s candidate, he would be going out and “doing things every day to help improve the lives of the people across the county.”
He said that