Why Renteria jumped into governor’s race

Amanda Renteria said she “gets it.” She understands that people will wonder why a longtime, behind-the-scenes political pro — though one who has never been elected to office and who has no fundraising base, no extensive campaign infrastructure and no name recognition — would jump into the California governor’s race 3½ months before the primary when others have been running for years.

Her parachuting into the race is so unusual that a top campaign adviser to former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s campaign wondered if she were a stalking horse for a rival Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a ploy to siphon Latino votes from Villaraigosa. Renteria laughed Tuesday and said, “No, no, no, no. It’s so absurd.”

Still, Renteria gets why people are dubious, given her long odds of winning. But she’s plowing ahead anyway.

“I think campaigns are different now,” said

Renteria, who was national political director for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and chief of operations for California Attorney General Xavier Becerra for less than a year before resigning last week to run for governor. “There are a lot of different ways to reach people and touch people. It doesn’t take $10 million, it takes 10 million hearts.”

Renteria, 43, is confident her campaign will have the money to touch all those hearts in time for the June 5 primary.

But even though the Menlo Park resident officially opened her campaign Tuesday — a week after word broke that she had filed official candidate’s papers to run — she isn’t quite ready to talk about how her platform differs from the four top Democrats in the race, who differ little on policy. Her campaign website didn’t include any policy positions on Tuesday.

Instead, Renteria will be rolling out her policy ideas over the weeks ahead. She wants her campaign to be “more connected to people on the ground.”

“Here’s how it goes with most campaigns,” said Renteria, who ran for Congress in 2014 and pulled only 42 percent of the vote against incumbent Rep. David Valadao, R-Hanford (Kings County). “People raise money, then poll test what people want to hear, then write their policy according to that. We’re not going to do that.”

She envisions a campaign that will “stand, sit and meet with folks in the community and say, ‘Do I even have this (policy proposal) right?’ We have to find out how policy would affect people” before announcing it, she said.

Renteria said that there’s more than enough time to do this before the primary.

She pointed to upsets in Virginia’s statewide elections last November. That’s when Democrat Danica Roem became the first openly transgender person elected to the Virginia General Assembly when she defeated a 13-term Republican incumbent, and Elizabeth Guzmán and Hala Ayala became the first Latinas elected to Virginia’s House of Delegates.

But they were running to represent legislative districts of 80,000 people, not to be governor of the nation’s most populous state.

“I completely understand why people are doubting this,” she said. “But we want our politics to be about people again. I know that sounds trite, but when you see what’s happening in our political sphere, you know that it’s important to have people be public servants again.”

Renteria said her tipping point for entering the race came in January when she was in Los Angeles to attend a Latino Community Foundation candidate forum. When she saw Newsom arguing with Villaraigosa about how they supported themselves financially outside of politics, Renteria said, “That’s not what politics is supposed to be about. That was a stark problem for me.”

When she returned to Sacramento, she gave two weeks’ notice to Becerra.

Last week, Renteria’s candidacy received a dig from a fellow Democrat, former state Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin, the only candidate in the field who has held office at the local level, served in the Legislature and held statewide office. Eastin said, “I think it puts you at a disadvantage if you’ve never held public office in California.”

Renteria cited her work — she was chief of staff to Rep. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich. — in crafting a massive farm bill in 2013-14.

Still, the doubts remain. After Renteria’s candidacy was announced last week, Mike Madrid, a Republican consultant working with Villaraigosa, told KQED that “something just doesn’t smell right with what happened . ... You don’t run for office (close to the campaign filing deadline) with no endorsement, no infrastructure and no campaign website.”

Asked whether he thought Renteria was a stalking horse for Newsom, who was narrowly leading Villaraigosa in a recent poll, Madrid said, “I think the dots are there.”

Renteria said when she heard that, “I laughed. I thought, this is some crazy, Trump conspiracy. There is zero fact to it.”