“One of many issues that I’m fairly lively in making an attempt to do is ensuring that I’m not the one individual in these rooms that appears like me,” Juan Rodriguez mentioned throughout an interview with The Instances.
Born in Burbank and raised in North Hollywood because the son of immigrants from El Salvador, the Democratic political marketing consultant and accomplice at Bearstar Methods mentioned that as a child he accompanied his mom to the Beverly Hills and Studio Metropolis houses she cleaned as a housekeeper. Years later, his first invites to political fundraisers got here from the folks for whom she had labored.
A 2005 assembly with Antonio Villaraigosa at a type of occasions strengthened his curiosity in politics. The previous Los Angeles mayor requested him who he was there with. Rodriguez mentioned his mom was working within the kitchen and that prompted Villaraigosa to introduce himself to her.
“Having my mom really feel seen is one thing I maintain very pricey to my coronary heart,” Rodriguez mentioned. “I used to be at all times so intrigued by how energy was at all times subsequent door to the individuals who didn’t have it. It made me imagine on the time that politics might be the nice equalizer.”
Villaraigosa employed Rodriguez as an intern just a few years later, launching a meteoric rise that has included stints as director of state relations for town of Los Angeles and as a prime aide to then-California Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris. Harris later tapped Rodriguez to steer her profitable 2016 Senate marketing campaign after which her transient 2020 presidential bid, a failed endeavor for which the politician and her advisors have been criticized.
Bearstar’s founders, Ace Smith and Sean Clegg, noticed the millennial strategist because the vanguard of a brand new technology of California political kingmakers after they employed him in 2017 to open a Los Angeles workplace for the marketing campaign technique agency. Along with Harris, his roster of Bearstar purchasers has included U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla and, most notably, Gov. Gavin Newsom. In 2021, Rodriguez efficiently led the marketing campaign towards the governor’s recall, for which he was named Democratic marketing campaign supervisor of the yr by the American Assn. of Political Consultants.
His work for Newsom just isn’t over. On a Monday afternoon in late October, Rodriguez, 39, mentioned he couldn’t discuss for the time being as a result of he was tied up in a gathering with Jane Fonda and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. The actors have been amongst a slate of high-profile supporters Rodriguez was courting to affix environmental justice teams of their marketing campaign to thwart the oil business’s efforts to reverse a 2022 California regulation that created necessary buffer zones round new wells.
Newsom championed the regulation. Rodriguez is main the multimillion-dollar 2024 poll combat to maintain it in place.
“There’s sort of a worldview by way of imaginative and prescient and what we imagine in and what we don’t,” Rodriguez mentioned, “so we regularly discover ourselves preventing the combat on each fronts.”
