For former Richmond Mayor Gayle McLaughlin, it’s time to take her city’s progressive politics on the road.

McLaughlin, a former Green Party member, is running for lieutenant governor in 2018 as an independent candidate, confident that California is ready for the type of all-in liberal politics that her Richmond Progressive Alliance brought to the East Bay city.

“I decided that at a certain point I had to do a statewide race,” said the 65-year-old McLaughlin. “If I ran statewide we could spread the Progressive Alliance farther and move it to a larger stage.”

The Chicago-born McLaughlin was one of the founders of the Richmond group, which ran a slate of progressive outsiders in 2004 to replace City Council members they said were both ineffective and too closely tied to Chevron, the city’s most powerful business.

After two years on the council, McLaughlin beat an incumbent mayor by 242 votes in 2006. She held that office until 2014, when she was elected again to the council, where members of the alliance now hold five of the seven seats. She resigned her seat this year so she could campaign to replace termed-out Democrat Gavin Newsom as lieutenant governor.

“We want to show the rest of the state how we did it, how we reduced crime, raised the minimum wage to $15 an hour and put in new rent control rules,” she said.

McLaughlin’s platform for her statewide run reads like Santa’s Christmas list for blue-state progressives. She is calling for single-payer health care, free tuition at public colleges and universities, higher taxes on millionaires, statewide rent control, a ban on corporate campaign contributions and an oil severance tax high enough to make it unprofitable to pump oil out of the ground in California.

The surprising support for Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in the 2016 presidential campaign sparked McLaughlin’s independent run. The progressive senator endorsed McLaughlin’s 2014 run for City Council, and she is looking for help from his backers.

The group Our Revolution, which was spun out of Sanders’ campaign, is one of McLaughlin’s most prominent supporters.

“I’ve been endorsed by 28 chapters from Del Norte (County) to San Diego,” she said. “I don’t have an endorsement from Bernie yet, but I hope to get it soon.”

But even Sanders, a veteran politician who has variously described himself as an independent, a socialist and a democratic socialist, recognized the dismal record independent candidates have in national elections and sought the Democratic Party’s nomination when he ran for president.

The prospects for third-party — or no-party — candidates are equally dreary in California. Since California became a state in 1850, there have been only three governors and three lieutenant governors who weren’t either Republican or Democrat. No one from outside those parties has been elected since 1914.

Running as an independent is “a daunting, daunting prospect,” said Larry Gerston, a former political science professor at San Jose State University. “People still tend to choose from one of the major parties or the other.

“It may not be right, it may not be fair and it may not be the way things should be, but that’s the way things are in California.”

Even in the Legislature, the last third-party candidate to win a seat was Audie Bock, a Green Party member who was elected to an Oakland Assembly seat in a 1999 special election. She immediately changed her registration to “decline to state” and ran a losing race for re-election as an independent in 2000.

“The state’s not the least bit open to independent candidates,” said Tony Quinn, a former GOP consultant who now works on the California Target Book, a nonpartisan publication that focuses on state political races. “More people are registering as (decline to state), but there’s no sign they’re looking past Democrats and Republicans in the elections.”

Then there’s the money question. State Sen. Ed Hernandez, D-West Covina (Los Angeles County), had $1.5 million in the bank as of June 30, the most recent statewide campaign finance reporting date. Eleni Kounalakis, a Democrat and former U.S. ambassador to Hungary, reported $1.3 million cash on hand, and Jeff Bleich, another Democrat and onetime U.S. envoy to Australia, had $611,000. All three have been busily adding to those accounts in the past six months.

Although McLaughlin did not file a campaign finance statement in July, she expects to report raising about $70,000 by the end of the year and $350,000 by the June 5 primary. Her campaign isn’t accepting any corporate money and is raising cash through house parties across the state.

“I know we’ll never have as much money as the corporate Democrats and Republicans,” she said. “But we’re running a field operation with key volunteers in every part of the state ... which shows the grassroots support we have.”

McLaughlin is on the road about two weeks of every month, making her pitch to progressive groups and every other organization that wants to hear from her, including Democratic political clubs.

“I know they can’t endorse me, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want to hear my message,” she said. “Then their members can vote however they want.”

The likely prospect of a long, uphill grind to the primary isn’t lost on McLaughlin, but she doesn’t let that concern her. While it’s a big jump from the Richmond City Council to a statewide office, “we know the tools we need,” she said.

“I’m running to win, but not just for that,” McLaughlin said. “We’re rallying people around our message. I want to be a conduit for that (progressive) voice.”