photo credit: Noah Abrams/KRCB
CA House D1 candidate Richard Minner.

Richard Minner is a true new comer to campaigning.

The Santa Rosa resident, software architect and engineer by trade, recently sat down at the KRCB studios to discuss his candidacy for Congress in the new California House District 1.

"Engineers want it to work and architects want all the parts to fit together and make a good whole," Minner said. "And I felt that that's not happening very well in Washington these days and hasn't been in my lifetime...so that's kind of what drew me to like, okay, what does it really take to do this?"

Minner said he was spurred to run for Congress - and bring an "engineering sensibility" and good math skills - after the passage of Proposition 50.

That's the redistricting measure passed by California voters last year which redrew the map in favor of Democrats, after Texas gerrymandered their congressional maps to boost Republican representation in that state.

"I assure you, gerrymandering is just a programming problem and it is completely solvable technically," Minner said.

He is running as a political outsider and independent. "My standard joke is that I was grew up in a conservative household because my parents were liberal Democrats in Berkeley, California, and that kind of put them a little on the the right side of things at the time," Minner joked.

He argued it's partisan politics and the partisan process as a whole that is the greatest issue facing the country, especially, he said, the party whips, who's role in Congress is to "whip" up votes on various legislation.

"What we have right now is a leadership in this country that is pretty much to the party leadership, the two parties," Minner said. "That you have these people who don't really want to tow the party line, but they just kind of forced to."

Minner said he hopes to appeal to Republican voters, and voters with no party affiliation who don't believe they'll be well represented by a Democrat.

"That's, you know, 40% of the district," Minner said. "If I get a good slice of that, I'll get it on the top two, and then I can continue the story in the general. It'll be against the Democrats and say, look, you know, it's a Democratic-leaning district now and I'm sure the Democrats is 35, 35 or so percent would prefer to have a Democrat in the house and Democrat majority...but then again, there's like that 20% non-partisan," Minner noted. "I would only need some slice of that and even maybe inspire some non-voters who basically [have] been sitting it out because they're just sort of not happy with the whole process."

But where does he stand on different issues? Minner said he doesn't quite have positions, but rather, going back to his focus on reforming the political and voting process, has an approach to how he would work as an elected leader.

He said he'd reserve judgement on specific issues, and lean heavily on a signature campaign idea, a district advisory council.

"So, what I'm looking at is a sort of a standing body," Minner said. "Part of this was born of...if you look at the history of representation, we're up to about 800,000 people per representative. It was like 30,000 and when the constitution [was being written], right?"

"So it grew and then they capped it at 435 and it's been growing," Minner said. "So the idea that somehow one person is going to represent this whole group seems unrealistic."

His vision, he said, is for a kind of intermediary body of 20 or so district residents from across the political spectrum, who would meet regularly and give their input on various issues.

"Just in terms of political biases I'm going to have some hardcore Trump supporters and some hardcore Trump haters and you know the Libertarians and the American Independents and all this kind of thing," Minner said. "As long as they're civil, and I know there are civil people of every group because I've talked to them, and as long as they can get together and express their real concerns and get past the talking points I think people can understand each other better."

"Then my job, you know I'm in the explainer...it's like I need to pull it all together," Minner said. "It's a broad group that would cut a cross issues is the idea."

Without the usual platform of positions, Minner's theory of the campaign is, "I would rather have one fifth as many five-minute conversations than five times as many one minute conversations. So, I'll be doing that around the district and getting ideas in each place," Minner said.

While Minner doesn't have that rundown of outlined positions like most candidates, he does, in addition to advocating against gerrymandering, call for elected representatives to adhere to voluntary term limits, and vows to only serve a single term if elected himself.