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Rafael Perez: The eternal return of Mike Schaefer, candidate for Congress

April 17, 2026

Somewhere in San Diego County lives an 88-year-old man by the name of John Michael Schaefer. He goes by Mike.

Elected to the San Diego City Council in 1965 and serving until 1971, he would go on to unsuccessfully run in dozens of local, state and federal elections across the country. But he never lost resolve, eventually being elected in 2018 and re-elected in 2022 to his current office on the California Board of Equalization. In that role, as his campaign website notes, “he represents 10 million people in five Southern California counties including San Diego, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Imperial.”

With Rep. Darrell Issa’s retirement, Schaefer is now running to represent California’s open 48th congressional district.

I spoke to Schaefer over the phone recently to discuss his congressional campaign.

Discussing his political affiliation, he explained why he switched from the Republican to the Democratic party back in 2003.

“Arnold Schwarzenegger was running for governor and I’m a big fan of celebrities … and I wanted to work on the Schwarzenegger campaign because I thought it’d be a lot of fun. And I find that all the Republicans I talked to were not interested in somebody from Las Vegas getting involved and I was a Republican so I decided I’m going to start a Democrats for Schwarzenegger campaign … and then I thought, well, I better change to be a Democrat because if the media starts to ask me about the campaign, and it turns out I’m a registered Republican, that would look pretty phony.”

To recap, his defection had nothing to do with policy – he was a Republican but the other Republicans wouldn’t let him help with the campaign so, as a Republican, he started a Democrats for Schwarzenegger campaign, and then realized that that may strike some as an odd thing to do, so he switched to being a Democrat in order to get a Republican elected. I’d love to know what the Democrats at the time may have been thinking when they saw a Republican start a Democrats for Schwarzenegger movement on their behalf.

Of what sort of policy he’ll be pursuing in Congress, Schaefer stated, “So we’re all for the working man. We’re all for efficiency in government. We’re all for getting rid of the toxic waste in Tijuana waters.” He added that he is afraid of Iranian drones striking California and that he will essentially vote for whatever the party tells him to. He closed by stating that, instead of the Nobel Peace Prize, Trump should receive the “Poopy Prize” – which I suppose I can agree with.

Although I was enjoying our conversation, we came to my least favorite part of these sorts of interviews, which was me sanctimoniously holding the elderly to account for their past misdeeds.

Apart from politics, as a lawyer, Schaefer has been disbarred in two states, California and Nevada. And as a landlord he was “ordered by a jury in 1986 to pay $1.83 million to former tenants in Los Angeles who sued because they said their apartments, rented from Schaefer, were overrun with rats, cockroaches, sewage and street gangs,” as the San Francisco Chronicle put it. In the 1990s he was convicted of spousal abuse, and in 2013 Brad Garrett, who starred on the sitcom “Everybody Loves Raymond,” was awarded a restraining order against him.

On two of those points, Schaefer explained to me that the squalid conditions in his apartment building were due to gang activity and that Brad Garrett refused to reciprocate Schaefer’s favor of putting him in contact with “the funniest black man in America.” In 2022, Schaefer addressed the spousal abuse charge, telling the San Diego Union-Tribune, “While some of my past is something I am not proud of, I am repentant for my mistakes.”

Our conversation then evolved into Schaefer indulging his impulse to recount anecdotes and me suspending disbelief for the remainder of the interview.

Did you know that Schaefer is a “recognized constitutional scholar nationally” and that he once charmed Margaret Thatcher with a poker chip?

We can glean a bit about what Schaefer truly values from his response to, according to him, Tucker Carlson comparing him to the late Rep. Wilbur Mills.

“He had a girlfriend named Fanne Foxe, a stripper, and one night they were in a pond. I don’t know if he jumped in the pond, but she jumped in, and he was with her … That made big national news, and he was a laughingstock. And so I just say I’m proud to be associated with Will Mills, who made quite a splash in Washington in his career.”

Rafael Perez is a columnist for the Southern California News Group. He is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Rochester. You can reach him at rafaelperezocregister@gmail.com.

Orange County Register

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Rafael Perez: The eternal return of Mike Schaefer, candidate for Congress

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