Out in eastern Contra Costa County, there have been political battles being waged in the pages of the community newspaper and in small demonstrations, and tensions this election year even boiled into a physical fight on a pickleball court.

The Chronicle reports today on some simmering tensions over political speech in Rossmoor, a senior community in the East Bay of about 10,000 residents, run by a private board with its own in-house newspaper, a public-access TV station, and shared recreation spaces. While many people may move there for golf — they have 27 holes on private courses — some from the protest generation of the 1960s also get involved in local clubs and political groups, like the 1,240-member Democrats of Rossmoor.

The Rossmoor News, that in-house news outlet, somewhat unusually for a community news outlet at a private residential community, had a tradition of dueling political columns with righ- and left-leaning stances until some recent new rules ended that tradition.

Per the Chronicle, Rossmoor has become much more racially and politically diverse than it was when it was founded in the early 1960s in a largely white and Republican part of the Bay Area. But there is clearly still a Republican contingent among the seniors living there, and tensions with their more Democratic-leaning neighbors have spilled into larger fights recently. In one instance, on the July day of the first assassination attempt against Donald Trump, two women came to blows on the town's pickleball court — one of them a Trump supporter, the other clearly not — and there was even a report of pulled hair left on the ground after the brawl.

To ease tensions, the board has instituted new rules that include having only one political column at a time in the Rossmoor News — different perspectives have to tradeoff week by week. And public demontrations have been limited to one hour every two weeks on a specific strip of grass near one of the community clubhouses.

Resident Katha Hartley, who directs the speakers program for the local Democratic club, tells the Chronicle that these changes are "exacerbating the problem," and treating residents like children.

"These are people who’ve marched, who’ve been through civil rights, MLK, assassinations, Vietnam," Hartley tells the paper. "These are experienced people who, when you say, ‘No, you can’t talk, you can’t come, you can’t express opinions,’ are saying, 'Oh, yes, we can. We’ve been doing it all our lives.'"

We'll see if these tensions boil over any further in the coming weeks before, and after, the election.

Photo: Aleksander Saks