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Author: Roberta Millstein

  • BREAKING: Jones drops eye-popping $10 million into campaign

    Wife of Jones’s former Dragoneer partner dumps in $5 million

    By Roberta Millstein

    With quarterly updates at FEC.gov, we have new information about just how many more millions Eric Jones and his supporters have dumped into his campaign to try to buy a seat in Congress in District 4.

    Jones himself has now added $4,700,000.00 to the $5,364,133.10 he had already spent, for a total of $10,064,133.10. That is a massive amount of money for a congressional campaign, especially one that is (at least in name) a Democratic candidate vs another Democratic candidate — Mike Thompson is the incumbent.

    Edited to add: An article in the Davis Enterprise states, “this makes Jones’ contributions the largest self-funding for a U.S. Congressional race in California history. It is also the sixth most self-funding spent on any race in California history.”

    Here is a screenshot from FEC.gov showing his previous $5.3 million in “contributions” to his campaign:

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  • 350 words that explain why you should vote for Mike Thompson over Eric Jones

    By Roberta Millstein

    [Note: This letter first appeared in the Davis Enterprise, here].

    Would you vote for a congressional candidate who had endorsed a variety of Republican positions while at the same time touting his progressive credentials and connections to candidates like Ro Khanna? Someone who: advocated for “immigration reform” for a “secure border”, said he was “ashamed” of Prop 50, called for “sunsetting” federal programs, donated to Republican politicians including a member of the Bush family?

    What if you learned that he had, in a very short amount of time, flip-flopped his views on important issues such as data centers and Medicare for All?  What if you found out that he had distributed two versions of the same flyer on the same block of the same street, one for Republicans and one for Democrats?

    What if you further learned that he had no political track record to back up his ever-changing political promises?  That he had been a partner at a Silicon Valley venture capital firm for 8 years (12 in total), allowing him to dump $5 million of his own money into his campaign?  And that on top of that, former colleagues and associates from the same firm continue to dump millions more into his congressional campaign, including a Super PAC, a legal but shady way to skirt campaign donation limits?  (If you’ve been deluged with mailers, flyers, and intrusive texts, now you know why).

    Citizens of Congressional District 4, the candidate described above is Eric Jones, recently resigned from Dragoneer Investment Group.  He would represent the interests of out-of-district tech oligarchs — resisting needed protective regulations at every turn — rather than the interests of ordinary citizens, whether Republican or Democratic.

    What if you were to further learn that there was another candidate, Mike Thompson, who has seniority and thus power to wield in the House, who has a proven and known political track record, who has deep roots in our district along with military service, who has legislative accomplishments in areas as diverse as affordability, climate change, agriculture and fishing, preventing gun violence, and supporting veterans?

    It’s an easy choice, friends.  Vote for Mike Thompson for Congress.

  • Eric Jones compares himself to Jesus Christ

    Jones’s shamelessness and hubris knows no bounds

    By Roberta Millstein

    Recently, I came across a Facebook reel where Eric Jones compares himself to Jesus. Here is a screenshot of the text that accompanies the reel:

    Screenshot from https://www.facebook.com/reel/1683293890472814 taken on 1 October 2026. Underlining is mine.

    [Edited to add: Note that in an earlier version of this article, I wrote that this was the same text that is in the reel, but it is in fact a bit different — I don’t know if he changed it or not. In the video, Jones brings up a comparison of himself and Jesus turning over the table of the money lenders].

    I must admit I was rather stunned by this. As someone who is not a Christian, I try to be respectful of religious differences and not to comment on other people’s beliefs. But this seemed above and beyond to me. So I wrote:

    Looking at it again, I also notice Jones’s implication that Thompson, who has dedicated his life to public service and who is supposed to be his fellow Democrat, is his “enemy.” Nice. My point, which I didn’t express as well as I would have liked, was that Jones was not in fact speaking any kind of “truth,” much less “truth to power.”

    But then I saw a reply from Sue Greenwald, which was much better than mine and really got to the heart of the matter:

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  • Super PAC supporting Eric Jones spends $1.1 million more on campaign ads in just three weeks

    A new Substack author joins the chorus of people revealing the dark underside of Eric Jones’s run to unseat Mike Thompson

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    By Roberta Millstein

    This is just a quick little post to let people know about a new Substack author to pay attention to. Regular readers of Davisite articles on Eric Jones already know about the awesome Judy Tipple, who has kindly let us repost some of her articles here. Judy’s articles are always in depth and on point, and she always brings the receipts! Now here comes Bruce Banner with some quick and pointed articles on Eric Jones.

    Both Substacks are free, so give them a follow!

    And I thought I had been tracking the expenditures of the Super PAC that has been supporting Eric Jones, but Bruce’s most recent Substack post caught me by surprise: $1.1 million spent on ads for the Eric Jones campaign in September alone. This from the candidate who is still deceptively claiming not to take corporate PAC money, not beholden to special interests.

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  • To share: Links to articles about Eric Jones

    By request, here are links to Davisite articles about Eric Jones’s bid to unseat Mike Thompson in the House, plus his recent donation #s (as best as I can determine them), for easy sharing with friends & on social media. I will try to keep this post updated. – Roberta

    *** This is a pinned post — scroll down if you’re on the main page looking for new Davisite articles on other topics

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  • Eric Jones campaign hands out different flyers for Republicans and Democrats

    A continuation of the deceptive tactics we’ve seen since the primary

    Republican-geared version of the Eric Jones for Congress flyer, with my annotations.

    By Roberta Millstein

    Last week, a Davisite reader sent me two versions of the same “Eric Jones for Congress” flyer that had been left at homes on her North Davis street on the same day.  The one she received seems clearly pitched to Democrats; the other one, which she found near her driveway, is strikingly different and seems instead to be pitched to Republicans, which some of her neighbors on her block are. [1] To paraphrase her reaction, “How stupid does Eric Jones think we are?”

    Now to be clear, this is not the first time we have seen this sort of behavior from the Eric Jones campaign.  After months of playing the progressive, e.g., with a mailer that touted his endorsement from Our Revolution and implied (falsely) that he had been endorsed by Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna, he:

    But this does seem like a new low, pandering to Democrats and Republicans alike, trying to be everything to everybody, while still ridiculously claiming to be against PACs and special interests — even though his former Silicon Valley Dragoneer Investment Group colleagues and associates have dumped millions of dollars into his campaign via direct donations and a Super PAC.  And he is still trying to tout his health care experience as being good for employees and patients, when the evidence shows otherwise.

    Why do I say that these flyers are pandering? 

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  • Flip-flopping Eric Jones first casts himself as a progressive, but now endorses right-wing policies

    Jones is “ashamed” of supporting Prop 50 and endorses “sunsetting” of federal programs

    By Roberta Millstein

    Eric Jones, former partner of the venture capital firm Dragoneer Investment Group, seems to be shifting dramatically rightward in the wake of (or in order to gain?) the endorsement of Republican Ray Riehle, his former opponent in Jones’s attempt to become the congressional representative for California’s District 4.  What’s going on here?  There are several aspects, so let me unpack.

    First, I remind readers that Jones still has financial interests in Dragoneer and that his run for Congress is largely funded by 1) his own money, 2) by maximized direct donations from his former Dragoneer colleagues and other high tech executives, and 3) by a Super PAC that has so far funded only Jones, coming from some of the same sources as the direct donations.  Each of these three categories individually amounts to millions of dollars.  This is Silicon Valley, venture capitalist, AI/high tech, data-center-favoring money, not money that is looking to benefit citizens.  Details can be found here.

    As I noted in an earlier article, Jones has sought to present himself as a progressive, implying affiliations with Ro Khanna and Bernie Sanders and touting his endorsement from Our Revolution (removed from two Our Revolution web pages and now mysteriously reappeared).  As I document in the same article, that appearance of being a progressive was always misleading, given his donation to a Republican candidate for governor — a member of the Bush family — and support of AI-driven health care, among other things.  But his mask seems to be slipping further.

    Generally, it is a sign of desperation when a candidate dramatically changes his stripes.  Does Jones think he can woo Republican voters?  Maybe so — after all, he founded an organization whose specific goal was to figure out what voters want (see previous links).  And did Jones craft a new platform to gain Riehle’s endorsement?  It’s hard to explain why else Jones would now say:

    “I supported Prop 50 as a response to the gerrymandering effort in Texas. But after speaking with thousands of voters at their doors, I am extremely disappointed — ashamed, even — of the way this was carried out in our own state.”

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  • Our Revolution seems to have quietly rescinded its endorsement of Eric Jones

    They should state their un-endorsement explicitly and explain their reasons for it

    By Roberta Millstein

    As I documented in a past article, Eric Jones is not a progressive.  Now it seems that Our Revolution, which Wikipedia calls “an American progressive political action organization founded as a continuation of Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign,” has finally figured out the same thing.  Having previously endorsed Eric Jones in his run to unseat Mike Thompson in CA-04, Our Revolution seems to have quietly withdrawn that endorsement.

    I want to be clear: this is not a critique of Our Revolution. I consider myself to be a progressive and I generally support their mission. I contributed to Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns, voted for him twice, displayed the swag. But organizations can make mistakes.  So it is no surprise to me that they would withdraw their endorsement once that they had the complete picture of who Jones is.

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  • Why are we waiting on the vote count?

    And other assorted reflections on the election while we wait

    By Roberta Millstein

    Waiting.  No one likes it.  In these days of Internet speed, we’ve gotten particularly bad at it.  But some things are worth waiting for.  An accurate vote count that lets every citizen’s ballot be counted is definitely worth waiting for.  A system that prioritizes voter access with in-person voting, mail-in votes (including time for ballots to arrive), and ample drop boxes, promotes citizen voices and democracy. California is doing things the right way, as hard as it is to wait.

    In Davis, many of us (myself included) would very much like to know the results of Measure V, the Yolo County judicial race, and the Congressional race, all of which remain too close to call (as does the governor’s race).

    But there is a little more going on in Yolo County in particular, as a recent NY Times article made clear:

    In California, each of those counties decides how much to spend on election operations, creating major differences in their capacity to count ballots, said Ben Gips, who works on state voting policy for Protect Democracy.

    Large counties such as Los Angeles and Orange have invested in equipment and staffing that typically allow them to finish counting more than 90 percent of ballots within a week of an election. Other counties can take three or four weeks.

    “Basically, the counties have been trying to fill in for the sort of absent role of the state,” Mr. Gips said, “and some counties are more able to do that than others.”

    The key areas that require funding are not only staffing and equipment but space to accommodate the workers and observers and to securely store ballots. In Yolo County, Calif., west of Sacramento, election officials knocked out a wall in their building a few years ago to make space to process the growing number of ballots, said Jesse Salinas, the county’s registrar of voters.

    “We are at capacity,” he said. “I don’t have any empty space.”

    Mr. Salinas, who is also the president of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials, said that more than 50 percent of the ballots in his county were either postmarked or dropped off in person on Election Day this year. He described a whirring processing center operated by 25 to 30 staff members, all of them scanning, opening and sorting ballots as quickly as possible.

    The office has two envelope-sorting machines that cost a quarter of a million dollars each.

    “Local elected officials are doing everything they can,” he said. “If I had more space and more equipment and more staffing — it’s a resource issue — if I had all that stuff, then it could happen faster,” he said.

    So there are several issues that have combined to make Yolo County’s ballot counting slow: less money devoted to election operations, resulting in a shortage of staffing, equipment, and space for vote counting, exacerbated by ballots turned in or mailed on election day itself: more than 50% of the total ballots!  Many Davisites seem to have heeded the call to wait to vote on the governor’s race given the worry about having two Republicans in the November election; that worry had essentially dissipated a few weeks before June 2, but it seems as though people were cautious and waited anyway. 

    In any case, I am grateful for Jesse Salinas’s diligence and those of his staff.  Perhaps Yolo County can consider providing him with more resources for the next vote.

    Other assorted reflections on the election:

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  • Who is Eric Jones?  A summary of the series with a quick wrap-up.

    By Roberta Millstein

    Who is Eric Jones?  I started with one article and didn’t know I’d be writing a series of them, addressing:

    1. Large numbers of maximized campaign contributions from Eric Jones’s former venture capitalist colleagues at Dragoneer Investment Group and other individuals from the high tech industry (link here).  The money comes from out of the district and so does Jones.
    2. Jones’s close connections to a Super PAC, New Leadership Now, that is pouring huge sums of money into his run for Congress (link here).
    3. Some of the Super PAC’s blatantly false claims about Thompson (link here).
    4. An update reflecting that the Super PAC spent $1.1 million on ads, including an Orwellian mailer, although as of May 30 that number exceeds $2.4 million. I have no doubt there will be  more on the way (link here).
    5. The extremely unlikely claim that Jones is a progressive, given his maximized donation to Republican Jonathan Bush, cousin of GW Bush, who is running for governor in Maine, with problematic views on health care, AI, and the environment — views that Jones seems to share. (link here).

    Beyond these articles, there are just a few more points than I want to emphasize:

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