Politically Speaking: How do Republicans make gains in San Diego in 2026? 

Vista Mayor John Franklin is running for San Diego County Supervisor in District 5, which comes as the incumbent Jim Desmond terms out and runs for Congress in the 48th District — the seat currently held by Darrell Issa, who is retiring.

Franklin joined Politically Speaking this week to discuss his anti-tax platform and the game of musical chairs local Republicans are playing as they seek to flip, or at least hold on to, seats during the midterms.

Below is a transcript of the full interview:

Safchik: It is earnestly election season. Now candidates have filed and the June primary is 75 days away. But who’s counting? Republicans hope to make gains in San Diego County this year, or at least cling on to the seats they currently hold. Vista mayor John Franklin is running for county supervisor in district five, and is here to give some insight into GOP strategy during this fierce midterms year. You’re counting down the days, right?

Franklin: I certainly am. Yeah. 

Safchik: Why are you running for this seat?

Franklin: Well, I’m running because our families need a break. We need common sense policy. We have three separate major tax increase proposals coming from the county of San Diego on the ballot in November. We expect a sales tax increase, half-cent county-wide. And we’ve seen proposals from the County Board of Supervisors to implement a transfer tax. The UT editorial board has written extensively about it. They said it would add $40,000 to the sale of a $700,000 home, or about 60,000 to the sale of a $1 million home. Incredible new taxes on affordability for housing. And the perhaps craziest proposal of them all. But it’s a real one that they put on the agenda and voted on by 3 to 2 and passed it. It would still need a vote of the people, but they actually have proposed creating a payroll tax. 400 municipalities in the United States charge a payroll tax. I used to live in one many years ago. I lived in Bethesda, Maryland, and I owed 1% of my income to the city. And when I found that out, I moved out of that city. You know, I don’t think we want to pay a payroll tax here in San Diego County, and. But that’s exactly what the county of San Diego is pressing ahead with.

Safchik: I know that you are ardently opposed to all of these tax hikes, but if the Democratic majority on the county board is able to push one of these through, if voters approve it, I’m curious what other plans you then have to lower the cost of living.

Franklin: Well, right now, the key is that we have elected leaders who can take this message to the people. I have formed a committee called the California Families Committee with Mayor John Franklin to be the leader to fight these sales tax and other tax increase proposals. Voters need to know what’s going on. They need to know how their money is being spent. And, you know, it’s really interesting when we take a look at these proposals, what the intent to pay for is, we know that the reconciliation package in Washington, D.C., was called the Big Beautiful Bill, and we know that it required verification for the first time for people who are not lawfully present in the country, for people who are not legal, permanent residents. It denies them the ability to receive. Now, the government was shut down. We had a big debate and one side said, it’s illegal to give Medi-Cal, Medicaid and the rest of the country to people who are not legally present. The other side said, we know it’s not legal, but it’s being done anyway. And that’s really true. And if you look at what Tara Larsen said, she said it’s going to cost the county $20 million to verify status. What that means very clearly, I don’t think it takes a logician to realize we’re not verifying status right now. So the other thing that she said is, in addition to the $20 million to verify status, she said the county will lose $300 million in benefits. And so, ostensibly, these new taxes would backfill and pay for Medicaid and Medi-Cal in California for people who are not legally present or who are not green card holders and not citizens. So one of the things that I’ve been talking to people about is, regardless of how you feel about whether or not taxpayers should foot the bill for people who aren’t here legally, do you think that we should be raising taxes at this time during an affordability crisis in order to pay for those benefits? And I think probably 80% of the taxpayers in San Diego County join me in saying no.

Safchik: Would you say that avoiding tax hikes is the issue at the heart of your campaign, if you had to boil it down to one?

Franklin: Well, absolutely. You know, I’m the only candidate running who has never supported and will never support a tax increase proposal. I’ve got one Republican opponent who supported three tax increase measures in recent years, 24 and 25. The Democrat that’s prominent in the race was the chair of the Democrat Party, endorsed every tax increase proposal on the ballot. This is not about partisanship. This is about affordability. This is about our families and their ability to live comfortably. And more importantly, you know, I’m only 47, but trust me, at 47, you start to see the light at the end of the tunnel, called retirement, and you start to think about, as expensive as it is in California, am I going to be able to afford a dignified retirement in this state? I have the same concerns that every senior does, and we need to make sure that we protect prop 13, the transfer tax proposal, which would again charge you as much as a, you know, half a, $50,000 on $1 million home. This is another way to break Prop 13. Prop 13, every senior knows, protects them from being property taxed out of their home, and it protects their ability to to live in their home in dignity. And before 1978 and Howard Jarvis, taxpayers were losing their homes because they couldn’t foot the bill.

Safchik: I want to move away from taxes for a second. I want to know what other concrete plans you have to make the cost of living go down. I’m talking about grocery or gas or rent.

Franklin: Yeah, and I didn’t mean to dodge the question. Let me tackle it head on. High rise, high density rental housing hasn’t made it cheap. It hasn’t made it more affordable to live in Manhattan, Boston, San Francisco, Washington, DC, or downtown San Diego. And it won’t make it cheaper to live in San Marcos Vista or Oceanside. We need housing that’s low density, low rise, the kind that we’re used to in North County.

Safchik: We have seen rent nominally decrease here in the city of San Diego? So what do you attribute that to?

Franklin: Well, we’re not seeing it in North County. We’re not seeing rent decrease. And we’re not seeing decreased rent in these high rise, high density towers. We’re just not. And it’s not a plan. Look, I explained to every young person today. We used to talk about the three legged stool of retirement security and dignity. And that was your savings, social security and your homeownership. Americans need to own a home if they’re going to have a dignified way to retire. You know, it’s terrifying. The cost of a mortgage. I was terrified by mine ten years ago when we bought the house we live in today. Over ten years, inflation has lessened the amount that I pay every month, even though it stayed the same. It’s really important that we make those opportunities.

Safchik: How did you do that in North County?

Franklin: Why does it matter for North County? The county has taken a state law called a vehicle Miles traveled policy, and they implemented the most restrictive policy in the state of California. They sent the county and the county Board of supervisors has done this. And it says that if you’re going to build six or more homes in the unincorporated areas, that you have to mitigate for the greenhouse gases that are expelled by the people who would live in these residences. That calculation formulary is so draconian that it has made it financially infeasible to build new homes. What happens? People wind up buying a home in Temecula now, instead of driving to Alpine or Descanso. Now they’re driving all the way to Temecula. We’re not actually reducing greenhouse gases. We’re increasing them, and we’re placing massive new affordability burdens. Why was it that your grandparents and the parents of a lot of our viewers were able to build new communities, but our generations are not able to do that? We really need to ask ourselves what’s broken about our current government and the affordability problem? What’s different, and how do we fix it?

Safchik: So you want to roll back that tax?

Franklin: Well, I want to eliminate the VMT policy at the County of San Diego. Obviously, there’s a state law that we have to comply with, but we don’t have to have the most restrictive policy in the state of California. We need to allow people to build the kind of homes attainable housing that the next generation can afford to buy and become homeowners. And that’s it’s that simple. And, you know, buying a condo when there’s an opportunity to buy a condo at a high rise is not the same thing. People want a yard in my part of the county in Vista, Oceanside, Escondido, San Marcos, people want to have a little bit of space to raise their family. And there’s nothing wrong with that. We chose the part of San Diego County we live in because of the suburban and semi-rural density. We don’t want the density of our communities to be increased by two fold.

Safchik: What makes you think, if not this year, then in the future, that Republicans will be able to seize back control of the county Board of Supervisors?

Franklin: Well, the ideas that we support, like Prop 36, I was the first mayor to join summer staff in our district attorney to sign that. And what have we seen? We’ve seen a Board of Supervisors and a state government that refuses to fund it. Two thirds of California voters and San Diego County voters voted to make stealing illegal again, to vote to make it a felony crime. It also increased penalties for those who are selling drugs. Not so that we could punish people, but so that we could help rehabilitate people. People are tired of seeing their neighborhoods filled with encampments. They’re tired of the garbage. They’re tired of the crime. They want a clean and a safe neighborhood. And, you know, there’s a lot of viewers watching right now who have children who are suffering with addiction and mental illness, who are living homeless. And unfortunately, I know you know somebody now because I know probably 4 or 5 people who have died from overdose. We all know somebody now who’s died. 1100 people will die this year from overdose in our county, and 500 of them live on the streets unsheltered. We can stop the epidemic of death on our county streets if we desire to do so. If we use our criminal justice system for compassion and accountability and to save people from dying on our streets, we can do it. We need to restore drug court. But in order to restore drug court, we have to have jail beds, because the threat of jail is what causes people to say yes to drug court. Drug court is a long term outpatient. Once a month in a courtroom, once a week in your caseworkers office. And we tell people, hey, if you participate in drug court, we will expunge your criminal record. We will get you a job training addiction treatment will help you recover permanent housing. We will help heal you. And when you’re done, you’re ready to join society again. But if you refuse or you’re not able to do that, if you don’t test sober, then you’re going to go to jail. We have the ability to help people who have committed numerous misdemeanor crimes and low level felony crimes to recover their humanity, to help heal them. We also have at the county conservatorship to help people get out of severe mental illness. SB 43 was passed that gave us more ability to help people who are addicted to narcotic drugs. We’re not implementing the tools that the people of California have given us because of rejection and opposition to the fundamental principles of helping people. And the voters, you asked, how are we going to regain control? Voters want common sense solutions. They don’t want massive new tax increases. They don’t want to continue to see people dying on the streets. And so when they look at local politics, they’re asking who can balance a budget and who can clean up my streets. And our policies are best designed to do that.

Safchik: Okay, I know you’ve really got your finger on the pulse of Republican politics here in San Diego County. I want to ask you if the party right now is cohesive enough to flip seats in this election?

Franklin: The party doesn’t win elections. Good leaders, good candidates do. And the way that you win is not by speaking to Republicans or Democrats. The way you win is by talking about the issues and providing real solutions. That’s always been the way it’s how an overwhelmingly Democrat city like Vista elected me, because I spoke about the issues people care about. And I’ve delivered real solutions. You know, in Vista, we’ve reduced homeless encampments by bringing our drug enforcement officers of the sheriff’s office to arrest the people who were selling drugs into the encampments, and the people who live in the encampments, who are dealing drugs to the other occupants of those encampments. When we use law enforcement and prosecution, the encampments left all by themselves because people who are addicted to heroin, meth or fentanyl, when they cannot acquire their drug that they’re addicted to, they go to another jurisdiction to find it. If all of the jurisdictions countywide would participate, we would have a major effect of encouraging people, if not forcing them to say yes to the help that we’re offering because the help is available.

Safchik: Arguably, the biggest storyline so far in this election cycle has been representative Darrell Issa stepping down, deciding not to run again in district 48. Do you think that’s because he was reading the tea leaves and didn’t think he’d be able to win in that redrawn district?