The scene at Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna’s election night party was mostly buzz cuts, dark suits and high-gloss black shoes. Deputies and politicos chatted over festive music while the local news played silently on a big screen at El Pescador Bar and Grill in Carson, which served as Luna’s campaign headquarters on Tuesday.
When the newscast declared around 9:50 p.m. that the sheriff had won a second term, dozens of friends, family members and colleagues nursing margaritas and tacos burst into a rousing round of applause. After one of the sleepiest sheriff’s races in recent memory, Luna had again cruised to victory over his predecessor, Alex Villanueva.
The vibe Tuesday night was very different than it was at the intimate gathering at his home in Long Beach in June 2022, when Luna learned that his relentless retail politics had fueled a convincing win over the rest of the field in that year’s primary.
Luna has risen far from the low-income neighborhoods on L.A.’s Eastside where he was raised in the 1970s and 1980s, when gangs and violence were rampant. His parents left behind their lives in the Mexican states of Sinaloa and Michoacán, immigrating to the U.S., where he was born in an East Los Angeles hospital.
Luna’s wife Celines said Tuesday she didn’t believe he was going to win when he sat her and their two adult children down in summer 2021 and told them he wanted to come out of his brief retirement to run for sheriff. But “he worked 110% and he never gave up” during both the 2022 and 2026 campaigns, said Celines, who brought cheerleading pom-poms to shake for her husband Tuesday evening.
“He got home after 10 o’clock most nights. He basically worked two jobs,” she said.
All that work paid off Tuesday, when Luna became the first sheriff to secure a second term in L.A. County since Lee Baca, who held the office from 1998 to 2014.
Villanueva, on the other hand, has now lost three consecutive elections, including his last two sheriff bids and his failed 2024 campaign for L.A. County Supervisor Janice Hahn’s seat, which Hahn won outright in the primary with nearly three-fifths of the vote. The former sheriff’s brand of sharp-elbowed politics plagued by scandal and vitriol has left him effectively radioactive in county politics, according to some political observers.
Luna, meanwhile, has presided over a period of relative calm at the Hall of Justice. “There are, unfortunately, fractured relationships that need to be fixed,” Luna told The Times four days before he began his first term in 2022. “Sometimes,” he added, “the way you approach governing makes a huge difference.”
Luna has made good on that promise to improve relationships. The L.A. County Board of Supervisors took drastic measures to try to rein in Villanueva’s behavior while he was sheriff, including voting to investigate the department’s activities and freezing millions of dollars in funding. Luna, on the other hand, was endorsed by all five supervisors during this year’s campaign.
“Sheriff Robert Luna has earned the trust and support of voters, and this election is an overwhelming show of confidence in his leadership,” Hahn said in a statement. “Crime is down, he is bringing transparency and accountability back to the department, and he is working closely with me and my colleagues on the Board of Supervisors to make our communities safer.”
A vague sense that the sheriff is “always in the news” for something good was part of what drove Rafael Nolasco to support his candidacy for a second term. The 49-year-old East L.A. native said last month that he planned to vote for Luna, whom he views as a role model for his children.
“Seeing somebody from your background having a position like that, to me it’s amazing,” Nolasco said after talking with Luna outside a taqueria in the neighborhood.
For Luna, campaigning has meant long hours away from his loved ones, so he’s excited to be able to focus solely on his work as sheriff.
“I want to get back to just doing my one full-time job and get reacquainted with my wife and my family. They sacrifice so much,” he said minutes after the sheriff’s race was called Tuesday night. “You’re working so hard, and at one point you take a deep breath and go, my God, how much have I sacrificed? And is it worth it? But tonight it was.”
Luna’s tenure as sheriff will now stretch from the late COVID-19 era through the 2028 Summer Olympics and beyond. He said late Tuesday that he’s got some priorities for his second term, including making more progress on deputy gangs and determining “what are we going to do with Men’s Central Jail.”
The U.S. Department of Justice announced in September that it is investigating conditions at Men’s Central Jail, which has been plagued for years by overcrowding, violence and other issues. Luna has said in the past that he would like to see the aging jail shut down if it is first replaced with a modern facility providing clinical care to inmates.
The sheriff also said he plans to track and adapt to how the broader political changes ushered in by the Democratic wave in the midterm elections Tuesday could impact approaches on immigration enforcement and other federal initiatives with local implications.
But first he said he’s going to take some time to determine the best way forward for his department.
“I’m going to bring my team back together, and we’re going to revisit all of our priorities … We’re going to continue the things that worked, reexamine things that may not have worked,” he said. “There’s a lot of work to do. This is not a finished product.”
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