Neophyte candidates seize Trump moment

Regardless of what they think of President Trump, Democrats should thank him for one thing: His election inspired a lot of smart, engaged people to run for office. And against everything he stands for.

The problem isn’t just that there are too many of these new candidates for the Democratic Party’s own good. It’s that too many of them want to start their political careers at the top of the food chain: governor, senator, state treasurer.

I’ve been baffled as to why more of these people don’t channel their newfound political enthusiasm by running for say, the state Assembly. Or county supervisor. Or the water board.

It’s easy to attribute this overreach to the bottomless ego of political candidates, otherwise known as Meg Whitman Syndrome. In 2010, the billionaire Silicon Valley CEO decided her first campaign for public office would be to run for governor. Why deign to climb the bottom rungs of the political ladder when you’re already the boss?

But unlike Meg, none of these 2018 candidates have $144 million of their own money to blow on a campaign. In most cases, they have raised less money than gubernatorial front-runner Gavin Newsom has in his sofa cushions.

Plus, I learned something different as I talked to these lesser-known candidates. Other than ego, what’s largely driving them is a combination of enthusiasm, earnestness and the desire to do their part to seize the political moment Trump ignited. Even if they don’t win, they want to make the point that things need to change. Soon.

In California, that enthusiasm is expressed by candidates like Vivek Viswanathan. Better known to most voters as “Who?”, the Democrat is running for state treasurer. State Board of Equalization member (and former San Francisco supervisor) Fiona Ma has the inside track, $1.6 million in the bank and the California Democratic Party’s endorsement.

Nevertheless, Viswanathan forges ahead. He’s a super smart guy. Has an undergraduate degree from Harvard, spent a year studying at Cambridge University, then got an MBA and a law degree from Stanford. He worked as a policy analyst for Hillary Clinton’s campaign and, most recently, as special adviser in Gov. Jerry Brown’s office. All that before he turns 31 next month. He’s also earnest.

So why does he start his political career running for statewide office in the nation’s largest state? What about running for Palo Alto City Council in his home city? There he could workshop a lot of his ideas about free college tuition and universal preschool.

“People, especially in the Democratic Party, are looking for new faces, new ideas,” Viswanathan said.

“This year, given how much more aware and awake everybody is, if there was ever a year to try something different like this, this is it. And if I win — and even if I do well — other candidates will try the same thing,” he said, “because it’s hard to see a future in which the system changes if everyone is elected doing things the way they’ve always been done.”

To attract attention to his campaign, Viswanathan just started running — literally — from Sacramento to San Diego. Yes, the whole way, stopping in little towns that few candidates will visit.

That’s not what Michael Shellenberger, who is running for governor, is doing to raise attention. As the president of the center-left Environmental Progress think tank, he’s the kind of wonky, engaged person people should want in government, especially because he isn’t afraid to take on his fellow progressives.

He entered the national spotlight more than a decade ago when he co-wrote a treatise called “The Death of Environmentalism” that took on sacred cows like the Sierra Club. He’s a public intellectual who I’ve mocked for his penchant for dropping the word “Malthusian” into casual conversation.

Yet over the past year, as he turned 46, he had an epiphany that he wanted to run for office. So, Michael, why not take your big brain and run for, say, the Assembly?

“Oh, god. No. I couldn’t do what I want to do there,” he told me the other day. He wanted to run for governor so he would have a larger platform to talk about ideas he’s proposing about affordable housing and nuclear power.

But the reality is few people are going to hear those ideas if he doesn’t have the money to project them into the political atmosphere. Raising money — odious as it can be — is a sign of how much people believe in your ideas.

Shellenberger said he’s raised about $35,000 so far, or about as much as Republican gubernatorial candidate John Cox’s flush campaign will spend on pizza this year.

And then there’s Alison Hartson. She is the best-known candidate for U.S. Senate you’ve never heard of because she’s received little attention. But thanks to a statewide network of supporters of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, the 37-year-old former Orange County school teacher raised $158,707 in contributions of less than $200 each over the last three months of 2017. That’s more money from small donations than either Sen. Dianne Feinstein or fellow challenger state Sen. Kevin de León, D-Los Angeles, has taken in over that period.

Impressive. And to her it raises a point about how our political fundraising system could improve. But it cost an average of about $1.1 million to win a state senate seat in 2014, according to the nonpartisan analysts at Maplight.

Hartson has a captivating personal story — she’s the sixth of nine children and the first to graduate college. After watching budget cuts decimate public schools, she became the director of Wolf-PAC, a national group that wants to change the “disproportional influence of money on our political system.”

So why run against Feinstein, who as one of the wealthiest members of the Senate has a bottomless wallet? Why not start locally?

“It was my experience that if we ever want to get these policies passed, we have to run for office at these offices at the federal level,” Hartson told me recently in San Diego at the state Democratic Party convention. “Kevin de León calls himself a progressive. But you can’t call yourself progressive if you take corporate money.”

Hartson may not be raising a lot of money, but she’s been encouraged by what people are telling her when they learn about her campaign: “It’s making people say, ‘Wow. She can possibly actually do that.’ ”