Huntington Beach has been a MAGA stronghold. Chris Kluwe has other plans.

Chris Kluwe swears that, even now, he doesn’t want to be a politician. He just wishes that everyday things in his longtime hometown of Huntington Beach made sense.

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It’s an increasingly tough ask.

Huntington Beach, long known as a quirky surfside town where folks with unique (and sometimes ugly) ideas could go to bake quietly in the sun, has become a national political lightning rod since its Democratic-leaning city council was swept out by a wave of pro-Trump politicians who proudly bore the Make America Great Again label — red hats and all. The nearly 200,000-person city has been seemingly roiled by one controversy after another over the past decade, from attempts to ban common library books to a moratorium on flying Pride flags on city grounds. Officials have fought state leaders for years over housing and have even come under fire for the way the city structures its voting process.

Kluwe, a former National Football League player mostly with the Minnesota Vikings, has watched the wobbliness of his local government from his own front porch. “I’ve been in this district for the majority of my life,” Kluwe tells SFGATE by phone in mid-June.

“The bulk of the people that live here kind of just want to be left alone,” he adds, “and they want their government to work. That’s both the Republicans and Democrats.”

Eventually, the routinely outspoken former kicker had enough. In February 2025, Kluwe signed up for public comment at a Huntington Beach City Council meeting to voice displeasure over a planned library plaque’s acrostic nod to the MAGA movement. Shaggy-haired in a hooded gray sweatshirt, Kluwe used his time at the podium to broadly denounce far-right ideology, saying among other things that “MAGA is explicitly a Nazi movement.” He then stepped forward toward the councilmembers and placed his hands behind his back (the “time-honored American tradition of peaceful civil disobedience,” he called it at the time), before being arrested and physically carried out by officers.

In the aftermath of the arrest, Kluwe lost his football coaching job at Huntington Beach’s Edison High School — and gained a reputation as an unapologetic Orange County Democrat with a voice. Strategists soon came calling. By June 2025, Kluwe was launching a campaign for the state’s 72nd Assembly district seat, which represents Huntington Beach as well as wealthier, often more conservative coastal areas like Newport Beach, Seal Beach, Laguna Beach and inland communities like Lake Forest.

In the June 2 primary, Kluwe earned enough votes to advance to the November general election. His rival in the race is a familiar one: Gracey Van Der Mark, a Republican Huntington Beach City Council member who is proudly part of the so-called MAGA-nificent 7 that first shook up Kluwe’s political worldview.

“I think it’s helpful for me not to have held political office,” Kluwe says of his fast turn into politics. “And also, to have very publicly said before that I don’t want to hold political office. Like, this is not something I ever anticipated doing.

“I think what is really resonating with people is that they’ve seen through my actions that I’m willing to stand up and fight for stuff. That I’m willing to sacrifice my own well-being and personal good in order to fight for other people, because that’s what I want from my politicians. I want my politicians to be willing to take a stand, to do the right thing.”

While Kluwe sees the Orange County of today as “slightly more progressive now than it was when I was a kid,” he harbors no illusions about the job ahead in this deeply purple, wealth-conflicted county. To win in November, he’s going to have to woo some Republicans.

“I obviously have my issues with MAGA politics,” he says, when asked about his plan to entice a broad spectrum of voters, “but I also have my issues with what the Democratic establishment has been doing as well. Democrats have had a supermajority in the state for a very long time, and if what they were doing worked, we wouldn’t be in this situation. We wouldn’t be facing an affordability crisis, we wouldn’t be facing problems like a high-speed rail that has cost over $100 billion and still doesn’t work.”

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(While California’s high-speed rail project is forecast to cost more than $100 billion, the state has spent only about $15 billion so far.)

Kluwe consistently pulls lines from both party playbooks. Yes, the system is rigged — but it’s rigged for the wealthy at large, not just blue state governors or Washington, D.C., politicians, as President Donald Trump may have you believe. Of course there are legitimate, street-level problems around us every day, like crime and homelessness — and the government should be trusted to do more to solve those problems, not less.

“With climate change and coastal erosion, there is a legitimate risk our beaches will go away,” he says — but also, “when gas is $6 a gallon, that’s a problem.”

If anything, Kluwe says emphatically, the majority of voters should be coordinating not along party lines or ideologies, but against a more simple reality: “The actual struggle is the 1% versus everyone else.”

At the local level, Kluwe hopes to see a different Orange County grow under his watch. “My idealized version of Orange County is one where we have slightly denser housing,” he says, though he’d prefer most upzoning to happen along existing busy boulevards rather than in the middle of single-family housing. There will still be plenty of “walled-off suburb areas,” he says, but connecting those spaces by public transit can also help. “Can we put in a trolley system? Can we put in light rail? Can we put in protected bike lanes, with shade cover with trees? Like, how? How do we make it more accessible for people to move around that doesn’t necessarily require a car?”

Some of those ideas are historically nonstarters for the places he’s trying to represent. Like Huntington Beach, nearby Newport Beach — where Trump captured 57% of the 2024 presidential election vote — has spent years trying to fight state-level housing mandates. Getting one of America’s wealthiest cities to happily agree to add more density is likely to prove harder than playing in the NFL.

Kluwe knows that he’s got a tough four months ahead of him, but he’s hopeful about his odds in the November election against Van Der Mark, whom Kluwe thinks makes for an easy villain with her penchant for book-banning and allegations of Holocaust revisionism. But that only goes so far, especially with the independent and politically distrustful folks in his potential district who may view Democrats and Republicans with equal disdain.

Ultimately, Kluwe’s pitch to voters is the same one they saw on that cellphone footage of him being hauled away by Huntington Beach police after dressing down the city council last year: If you want someone with conviction who believes that doing what’s needed to make the world better is an active, not passive, job, then this former NFL punter could be your man. 

“I think just across the board, people want to feel … that, like, tomorrow will be a little bit better than today,” he says, “and you know, that today was a little bit better than yesterday.”