Next year's race for governor has just been joined by a local man.
Not San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, who's still not taking the bait for such a run.
The candidate is John Cox, a multimillionaire attorney, CPA and financial adviser who's gotten into state politics after running as a Republican for U.S. Senate and other offices in Illinois.
He's only the second Republican who's stepped forward in the 2018 California governor's race.
In his announcement, video-recorded by a professional crew at home in Rancho Santa Fe for statewide distribution, Cox took aim at the state's sales tax, pension debt and many other issues he thinks make California unfriendly to business.
He accuses California lawmakers of catering to special interests that reward them with generous campaign contributions.
"The California we have is in trouble, and we need to do something about it,” Cox told NBC 7 in an interview Tuesday.
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His solution is a so-called "low-cost New Hampshire-style neighborhood legislature" to foster more grass-roots politics.
Cox believes that would take fundraising "completely out of the equation."
Even so, facing current realities, Cox is putting up a million dollars of his own money for the campaign, and has raised another million.
“Wouldn't it be nice,” he asked rhetorically “if we had campaigns that were run door-to-door, where candidates actually had to discuss issues, and could actually build up a consensus on what we ought to be doing?"
Six people have now declared for the race – four of them Democrats, led in the polls by Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom.
The other announced Republican gubernatorial candidate so far is 84-year-old Roosevelt "Rosey" Grier, who carved out an acting career after earning NFL Pro Bowl status playing for the Los Angeles Rams.
California voters won't cast ballots for a new governor for another 15 months.
But Cox doesn’t seem leery of campaign fatigue, already having spoken to what he estimates as dozens of audiences.
"The system has to change to something that our founders intended,” he said. “Where we actually had reasonable discussions about police and then we can build an agreement that we can go forward with."
