By Scott Steward
At this critical time, as we confront the destruction of our democratic institutions and equal representation under the law, we have a choice to make while we can still vote.
There is no need to worry that a Democratic primary challenge will eliminate all Democrats from our safely blue district race. In this year’s District CA-4 Congressional primary election on June 2nd (early voting starts on Monday, May 4th), we can vote for one of the two leading Democratic candidates: Mike Thompson or Eric Jones.
Mike Thompson, the 28-year incumbent, has shown that no amount of phone calls and letters will change his commitment to a system that “trusts the process.” Thompson’s politics will not allow him to raise taxes on gross excess (oil, drug, gambling, tech, and the weapons industries). He has and will continue to rationalize excessive profits and justify incarceration at home and $6 trillion (since 2001) in support of endless war.
Even though Thompson shares many of the same values I and most Yolo County residents hold, he has not fought for them hard enough. The question is, after so many years of his leadership, why are we entering another in the series of forever wars abroad, why are Americans staring down the barrel of ICE agents’ guns at home, and why can only one-fifth of 25–40-year-old Californians afford to buy a home?
These trends don’t seem to require Thompson to examine his approach, as he explained at the League of Women Voters meeting in June of 2025 “they do a ranking of bipartisanship, and I always rank real high….If we are going to do big things, we need to be bipartisan; otherwise, every time we have a majority change it all goes away.” What is not going away, Trump and Project 2025. Get along politics has been emptying the pockets of 90% of us for 50 years; Thompson has been in office for most of them.
Eric Jones is Thompson’s challenger. Jones is a 35-year-old self-made entrepreneur. He grew up in Maine, where his family faced and overcame financial hardship. His mother worked for low wages as a nurse, married to a disabled war veteran. Eric’s older half-brother, Joe, served in the Navy. Eric is no stranger to struggle and understands the essential role of government safety nets. His mother made good use of aid to further her nursing career and supplement the household income. A top student, Eric attended Yale on scholarship and moved to California in his 20s, where he has settled in Napa to raise his family.
“I’m not taking corporate PAC money, I’m not taking lobbyist cash, and I’ll never trade a stock in Congress. This campaign is fueled by people who work for a living ….” Eric Jones
Eric is part of a wave of younger Democratic primary challengers who have been raised without illusions about how badly we need to remake the Democratic Party from the bottom up. We have an opportunity to send a message to DC and to the California Democratic Party’s captured delegate system (which just voted to endorse a host of incumbents, including Thompson).
Eric Jones is running for the CA-4 seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Instead of wasting time we don’t have trying to untie the Gordian knot, Eric wants to cut the ties that bind us to the failed incremental doom train. A train that provides the military industry with literally countless dollars, corporations with unregulated profiteering, and promotes social dystopia.
It took the shooting of Renee Good to get Thompson to rally us around impeaching Kristi Noem (there had been 37 ICE killings before Good’s). The outrage is late, coming now that Thompson has a challenger, and challenger Eric Jones is taking the job of winning our vote very seriously. We have given Thompson and the Democratic leaders the moral high ground time and time again. The cost of their failure to stick to principle is too high.
How many times are we, the hardworking volunteers for a just, democratic America, going to hand over the moral momentum and a series of Democratic upsets, like those leading up to the November 4, 2025, victories (NY Mayor Mamdani, Virginia Governor, and New Jersey Governor), only to see, just 6 days later, the current Senate Minority Leader, Schumer, convince 7 “Democratic” senators (including the Nevada Senators Jackie Rosen and Cortez Masto – also owing their victories to huge national grassroots support) to vote to open government and fund ICE to the tune of $9.9 billion? We did not get health care funding. We did get a DHS-approved path to unlimited H-2B foreign worker visas, used to undercut US tech workers. Thompson does not seem that upset.
Eric Jones is committed to building a better future and has assembled a team to win the opportunity to do so as our representative in the House. Not to be unappreciative of our local elected officials, but in our time, no one among CA-4’s established Democratic elected officials rose to challenge Thompson. This is something our majority party should consider.
Eric Jones is not a professional politician, and he is not on the doom train that Thompson wants us to keep riding. I support sending Eric Jones to Congress because he stands against the system of “get-along politics.” He has not been groomed by the captured portion of the California Democratic Party. He is smart and will not find an excuse to do anything less than make this world a better place for his children. He is committed to affordability, access to health care, housing, and childcare. Eric is a fighter and has the independence to represent all of District CA 4 in Congress.
Davisite 
Leave a comment