Will The DCCC Lose Another Blue District In Central California? Meet Amanda Renteria

Amanda Renteria

A few months ago, an old friend was raving to me about a woman he had worked with at the Treasury Department, Amanda Renteria. She's running for the Central Valley seat currently occupied by mainstream conservative Republican David Valadao. CA-21 stretches from just south and west of Fresno, down through Hanford and Delano to Bakersfield, which it shares with Kevin McCarthy's 23rd CD. McCarthy's deep red district has a PVI of R+16 and Romney beat Obama there 62-36%. Valadao has a more problematic district with a D+2 PVI. It's one of the bluest districts in the country with a Republican incumbent, thanks, almost completely to legendary DCCC incompetence. While Obama was beating Romney with a convincing 55-44% win, the DCCC had managed to botch the primary and wind up with a fatally flawed candidate, John Hernandez, who lost to Valadao 55,130 (59%) to 38,402 (41%). Although Hernandez managed to scrape a victory in Kern County (Bakersfield), he lost in the 3 other counties-- Fresno, Kings and Tulare-- by very wide margins. Valadao crushed him in Kings County 70-30%, sealing the election.

In reporting on the launch of the Latino Voter Project this week, the New York Times took a little look at the Renteria race against Valadao this cycle. Despite my friend's rave reviews of Renteria, we haven't gotten into the race, primarily because she was coming off as just another Steve Israel "mystery meat" candidate who didn't seem to be offering any compelling reason for voters to replace their incumbent with a first-time candidate. Her typical DCCC no-content website offers a nice biographical sketch-- and no issue positions. The Times piece, alas, doesn't fill in any of the blanks. Like the website, the sadly hackish and utterly superficial reporting (and by a veteran reporter no less!) is mostly about Renteria's inspiring life story.

“Ya es tiempo-- you have a voice,” Amanda Renteria, a Democratic candidate for Congress, declared one recent Saturday morning at a park in this little city southeast of Fresno. There was no need to translate the Spanish. The park was festooned with “Amanda Renteria para el Congreso” signs.

As she told her local-girl-makes-good story-- daughter of onetime migrant fruit pickers, degrees from Stanford and Harvard, a job in Washington as a senator’s chief of staff-- men in ranchero hats smiled with pride. Women choked back tears. Candidates like her, they said, do not come around often in places like this.

“We have been waiting, waiting,” said Diana Rodriquez, a retired teacher whose parents also worked the fields here in the agriculturally rich Central Valley, in a largely Hispanic congressional district. “We helped Obama win the election, and they still see us to be passed over. This is going to help the overall national cause-- respect for our community.”

But if Ms. Renteria represents the hopes of her party and her people, she also reflects Latino Democrats’ deep angst. Seven out of 10 Hispanic voters supported President Obama in 2012, but Latinos-- the nation’s most rapidly growing minority-- are greatly underrepresented in public office.

“I have been troubled by a lack of Latino bench for the future,” said Bill Richardson, the Democratic former governor of New Mexico. He said Democrats take Latinos for granted, and have not been “as aggressive as Republicans in attracting and encouraging Latino candidates.”

On Monday, Cinco de Mayo, a new nonpartisan organization, the Latino Victory Project, will announce an effort to promote Hispanic political engagement, in part by grooming Latino candidates; its political arm will endorse eight-- all Democrats, including Ms. Renteria.

...Democrats insist they are investing, in candidates like Leticia Van de Putte and Lucy Flores, running for lieutenant governorships in Texas and Nevada, along with Ms. Renteria. Ms. Renteria, 39, was the first Latina Senate chief of staff, to Senator Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of Michigan. She moved to Sanger in August with her husband and two young sons, in a bid to unseat Representative David Valadao, a well-liked Republican of Portuguese descent.

“I feel like I’ve spent a lot of my life being one of the few,” Ms. Renteria said. “I see it as my responsibility to bridge two different worlds.”

The race is a priority for Democrats in what could be a bleak year. Democratic donors and groups like Emily’s List have flocked to Ms. Renteria, helping her raise $630,000 so far, though Mr. Valadao has twice that.

Now, Ms. Renteria will get a boost from the Latino Victory Project’s political action committee, which intends to run television ads and a get-out-the-vote effort in key districts.

Co-founded by two top Obama fund-raisers-- Henry R. Muñoz III, the finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and Eva Longoria, the actress-- the project will “use our numbers, our votes and our dollars” to create “the next generation of leadership,” Mr. Muñoz said.

Its PAC is open to backing Republicans, as long as they support immigration reform, and is looking far beyond 2014.

Here in Sanger, though, Ms. Renteria’s race for Congress illustrates the challenges. In 2012, Democrats ran a weak candidate, bungling an opportunity to win this politically diverse district, one of the poorest in the nation, where Democrats outregister Republicans by 14 percentage points and Hispanics make up 55 percent of the voting age population. Ms. Renteria’s challenge now is to get them to the polls.

The cultural dynamics are complex. Mr. Valadao, 37, who calls Ms. Renteria “an outsider from Washington,” has deep roots in the conservative community of Hanford, where his parents, who emigrated from the Azores, founded their family farm. Despite his Spanish-sounding surname (he also speaks the language), the race typifies the region’s class divide, said Darry Sragow, a longtime Democratic strategist in California.

“There’s always been a real class dichotomy between the Latino farm workers and the farmers,” Mr. Sragow said. “We’re talking Steinbeck, a very deep divide.”

Grow Elect, a group dedicated to electing Hispanic Republicans in California, has embraced Mr. Valadao. “We’re starting at the grass-roots level,” said its president, Ruben Barrales, “because you can’t depend on superstars.”

Immigration is, not surprisingly, a pressing issue, along with jobs. Mr. Valadao is among the handful of Republican House members who favor a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, though Ms. Renteria accuses him of not pushing his party leaders to act.

The congressman says he believes his conservative politics on social issues like abortion and also on taxes, appeal to Hispanic voters, especially small-business owners who “work really hard for their money” and “don’t want to see a bunch of government guys regulating them.”

But analysts say the race will be close, and Ms. Renteria is working her way into Latino circles. At a Mexican-American dinner dance in Hanford, Mr. Valadao’s hometown, she ran into the parents of a Stanford classmate, and was invited by a local woman for a midnight meal of menudo, a traditional Mexican soup.

Earlier in the day in Sanger, the city’s former mayor, José Villarreal, introduced her. He said he had “a lot of questions” when she moved to town, but was won over. “She is a daughter of the Valley,” he told the crowd. “She is one of us.”

Renteria can win this race by taking strong progressive stands and drawing a powerful distinction between herself and the conservative Valadao. But the DCCC and their incompetent consultants tell her not to and she won't and she will lose. Pity.