Amanda Renteria's campaign for California governor—if you can call it that—sure seems to be an utter mystery. Renteria has never held public office, is completely unknown except to a handful of Democratic insiders (and longtime Daily Kos Elections readers), and badly lost the only race she ever ran, a 2014 bid for the House. She nevertheless joined a field of major heavyweights who've been running for years and have stockpiled the kind of enormous war chests that are a stark necessity in a state as huge as California.
Bizarrely, she filed (without any warning) just weeks ahead of the deadline, then went quiet for days after submitting her paperwork, lacking a website or even any staff. Indeed, her entry came so late that she won't even be permitted to speak at the party's annual convention this weekend. Renteria finally did announce on Tuesday that she was running after almost a week of radio silence, but the Los Angeles Times observes that her new kickoff video “sheds little light on who she is or why she is running.” And to top it all off, in a new interview with the paper, "she offered no specifics about where she stood on the most pressing issues facing the state."
So why would we even care about such a seeming Some Dude? In large part it's because Renteria is a seasoned operative who's served as Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow’s chief of staff, was national political director for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, and just finished a stint as a top aide to state Attorney General Xavier Becerra. It's therefore almost inexplicable why someone with a background like this would launch a campaign that doesn't even rise to the level of "quixotic." As the Times notes, Renteria's decision was so odd that it’s "stoked conspiracy theories," though the paper seems too polite to suggest what any of those theories might be.
Politico, however, was only too happy to oblige. In sum and substance, some backers of former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, one of the leading Democrats in the race, say they fear that Renteria is a "spoiler" or "stalking-horse" designed to peel Latino votes away from Villaraigosa in the Central Valley, where she's from and ran for Congress.
A spokesperson for Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who'd stand to benefit most from such a scheme, rejected the notion completely, of course, calling it a "tinfoil-covered grassy knoll" and "severely sexist." Renteria, however, didn't bother to deny the charge at first, telling Politico, "I'll be in touch next week." Only later, to the Times, did she object, calling such a notion "Trump conspiracy-like, based in zero fact."
The only other working theory is that Renteria is hoping to build up her personal brand for a future run of some sort, but this certainly isn't the way to go about doing so. Renteria told the Times that she has no plans to run a "traditional campaign where you are looking to raise $10 million" but rather intends to "get her message out through social media" and "grassroots campaigning." Now that sure sounds like a Some Dude.
