SLO County mailer targets supervisor candidate’s past beliefs. Fair game or ‘slander’?
More than 7,000 campaign mailers painting San Luis Obispo County supervisor candidate Michael Erin Woody as a hard-line conservative in the District 2 race landed in mailboxes across the North Coast on May 5.
Jim Dantona — whose campaign produced the flyer — said highlighting Woody’s past positions show his true values, while Woody called the mailer “slanderous” and said some of his positions have changed significantly over the past eight years.
The flyer, which featured Republican symbols, including the party’s elephant mascot and bolded red text, contains a photo of Woody’s face mid-speak paired with the quote, “I don’t believe in man-made climate change,” which he previously told The Santa Barbara Independent in April 2018 when he was running for Salud Carbajal’s congressional seat.
The flyer says Woody lacks Central Coast values because he “wants local law enforcement to work with ICE,” “wants to put guns in classrooms and arm teachers” and “supports more oil drilling.”
The back page features another Woody quote where he said, “I consider myself the real Republican,” from the same 2018 interview. The flyer also included a QR code linking to 2017 and 2018 articles and TV clips that support Dantona’s claims.
Woody voted for Trump in 2016, after previously voting for Barack Obama, but after becoming disillusioned in the ensuing years, he left the Republican Party in 2019 and is currently running with no political party affiliation in the District 2 race.
He said that the mailer contained a slew of inaccuracies and represented “the slanderous politics we need to get rid of.”
Dantona told The Tribune the mailer was sent out to pinpoint how his values deviate from his opponents.
“It would be, to be honest, campaign malpractice if I didn’t compare our distinct and accurate value differences,” he said.
The Tribune looked into the flyer’s allegations and asked Woody about his views on oil drilling, climate change, guns in schools and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as part of its Reality Check series.
Woody says views on climate change, ICE have changed since 2018
Woody said that he supported ICE a decade ago when Barack Obama’s administration was using the agency to remove felons and other dangerous people from the country.
At the time, he said his views were aligned with Obama and the Democratic Party at large. In 2018, he told KSBY that he did not support sanctuary city and sanctuary state policies and thought that local police should be able to work with federal agents to remove criminals living in the county illegally.
However, he said ICE under the current Trump administration is “nothing short of scary.”
“Millions of us have looked at this and said, ‘Woah, you know, let’s step back. This is not working, right,’” he said. “Local law enforcement should not be working with ICE, of course not.”
As for putting guns in classrooms, Woody said he is strictly opposed to the idea.
During a 2018 KSBY congressional candidate debate, Woody said educational institutions should have “the ability to arm themselves as the local schools and school districts see fit.”
Woody said he was talking about having more community resources officers and Police Activity League programs in Central Coast schools, not giving teachers guns.
“A lot of the principals are very happy with those programs,” he told The Tribune. “So to turn this around into ‘I support guns at schools,’ I can’t even express how laughably ridiculous this whole thing is.”
Woody also said he is adamantly opposed to expanding oil drilling off the Central Coast.
“The reality is that I have been sitting here fighting desperately against all of this and fighting putting any type of energy development in our oceans for decades with my tribal council and my tribal group, we’ve always fought against this,” he said.
Woody sits on the Salinan Tribal Council of San Luis Obispo and Monterey counties.
According to Dantona’s site, Woody “wants to drill for more oil,” based off of a 2018 interview with KSBY where Woody explained that he was against extending offshore oil drilling operations, but he was open to some oil drilling expansion “on land that is safe and secure.”
Even though Woody didn’t believe in man-made climate change in 2018, he said his views have evolved over the past eight years.
After he left the Republican Party in 2019, Woody said he sat down with his Harvard University colleagues and hammered out questions and inconsistencies he saw regarding whether climate change was caused by humans.
After a few months of studying and researching the topic, he determined that man-made climate change is happening.
“It is real, and we do have to address it,” he told The Tribune.
Dantona said he found it difficult to believe that a middle-aged person could change his mind so abruptly on an issue that scientists have known about for decades.
“These are core value things that I have a hard time believing they change that drastically between eight years — and really are things that we’ve known for a long time,” he added.
As for Woody’s past comment about being “the real Republican” in his 2018 campaign for Carbajal’s congressional seat, he said the quote was taken out of context.
Back then, he identified with the values of the original Republican Party that former presidents Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt upheld, like individual rights, civil rights and environmental issues, Woody said.
“He’s trying to tell everybody (I’m) this secret MAGA Republican, and that’s simply ridiculous,” he said.
Campaign flyer used Woody’s political beliefs from 8 years ago
Dantona said the flyers are meant to help District 2 voters differentiate between the two supervisor candidates’ values.
“Voters can’t go over every decision we will ever make or be faced with, right? So, the values are really what you’re going to have to vote on,” he said.
Dantona’s campaign has since sent out another flyer with his core values — ICE out of SLO County, climate change is real, no to offshore oil — posed in direct opposition to Woody’s past statements on the subjects.
Woody said it’s fair to be questioned about his views from 2018, but “it’s absolutely unfair” for his past comments to be twisted and contorted for political gain.
After the flyers went out, Woody said he rolled his eyes and felt more disappointed than angry.
“I was just disappointed that this is what politics has turned into, and continues to turn into,” he said. “We got serious problems going on out here, and this is what he wants to do during this campaign.”
This story was originally published May 18, 2026 at 2:44 PM.
