Chapter Three: Ballot Measure Spending for Ads, Mail, Social Media, etc.
By F.E.C. Nerd
This chapter will walk you through how to determine who is pushing/opposing State ballot measures. First, the Federal Election Commission has no role with respect to California ballot measures. Instead, the California Secretary of State’s website and the California Fair Political Practices Commission’s website will play a role in our research. Plus, there are the tag-lines in the ads and mailers we are all receiving. A sampling is displayed here.
(From press release) Women who serve as the primary wage earners for their families and seek financial assistance to further their education or training are encouraged to apply for the Soroptimist Live Your Dream: Education and Training Awards for Women.
The application deadline is Sunday, Nov. 15. This year, Soroptimist International of Davis will present one or more awards ranging from $2,500 to $6,000. The top recipient’s application will advance to the Sierra Nevada Region and possibly the international level, where she could receive up to $15,000 more. Recipients may use the Live Your Dream Award to offset any costs associated with their efforts to attain higher education or additional skills and training. This may include tuition, books, childcare, transportation or other education-related expenses.
The Live Your Dream Award provides more than $2.8 million in cash awards to head-of-household women in need each year. Since the program’s inception in 1972, more than $35 million has helped tens of thousands of women achieve their dreams of a better life for themselves and their families.
Soroptimist is a global volunteer organization that provides women and girls with access to the education and training they need to achieve economic empowerment. Learn more at https://www.sidavis.org/.
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:
Chapter Two: Super PAC Spending for Ads, Mail, Social Media, etc.
LESSON TWO: OTHER OUTSIDE ACTORS IN DISTRICT 4 PRIMARY
Step One: Start back at the basic FEC.gov website, scroll down as before and click on “House of Representatives candidates” and then when that page opens up, scroll to the left-hand column and enter in the “Candidate Name” box, “Jones, Eric” and click on the drop-down entry for “Jones, Eric” without any middle name. Scroll to the right into the main frame and click again on the link for “Jones, Eric.” You should now see this page:
Step Two: Scroll down in the left-hand column and click on the dark blue link “Compare to opposing candidates” and you will bring up the following screen that shows all the candidates who ran in the June Primary for California Congressional District 4 and each candidate’s fundraising totals as of June 30, 2026.
Preface & Recap on Chapter One: Contributions & Expenditures in 4th C.D.
[Note: Chapter 2 follows this short preface and recap]
By F.E.C. Nerd
Hopefully, you have taken the lessons learned from Chapter One and have done some exploration on your own. It will be helpful to have those research skills honed because new additional disclosures will be forthcoming very soon. Those will cover the period from July 1, 2026, through September 30, 2026. That’s three whole, long months of fundraising and spending. I also want to point out a couple other customizable search methods you can try.
Step One: Log into your favorite Internet browser. Then go to:
Step Two: Scroll down the page towards the bottom and click on the link for “House of Representatives Candidates.”
Step Three: So that you know how to search for any House candidate use the search box — “Candidate Name or ID” in the upper left corner. Type in: “Jones, Eric”. A drop-down list of several “Jones” candidates will appear. Select the one for “Jones, Eric H6CA04222”. That will take you to the link for Eric Jones’ campaign reporting.
Step Four: Scroll right to get into the main display and click on the “Jones, Eric” link that is active. This will take you to where we start to get to the substantive data.
Step Five: Scroll to the left and click on the dark-blue box “Compare to opposing candidates.”
This will bring up another page of data (as shown below) for the main three candidates in the June Primary. Mike Thompson finished first, but Eric Jones narrowly bested Raymond Riehle, for second place and onto November’s General Election run-off. We will return to this screen again as we do our research.
Note the data under “Cash on hand” as of 6/30/2026. Note that Eric Jones reported just $665,718.27. That is nowhere near enough to buy all the TV ad-time to run his AI-generated ads attacking his opponent. So, we can expect some large contributions to be reported when the 7/1/26 – 9/30/26 disclosures are filed later this week.
Step Six: Click on “Jones, Eric” and then once the page loads, click on the button on the right “Browse Receipts” and get the drop-down search categories in the left-hand column. We spent some time in Chapter One, Lesson Two searching these, but I wanted to point out another type of search.
Step Seven: Scroll down in the left-hand column and at “Employer” let’s insert a couple names instead of the more general terms “inc” and “llc” that we used in Lesson Two. Enter “Anthropic” and click the right > button and we find that donors affiliated with Anthropic contributed a total of $7,500 all of it on 9/1/2025 — 8 days prior to Eric Jones filing his Statement of Candidacy.
Now enter “Palantir” in the search box . (Palantir showed up in one of our previous searches of contributors as being a client of one of the venture capital firms whose personnel were donating to Eric Jones’ campaign). Click on the right > button and we see that one of Palantir’s personnel contributed the double-maximum ($7,000) to Eric Jones on 12/27/25. Palantir works with ICE.
This will take you directly to the Homepage of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and its webpage that permits browsing of candidates’ financing. This is the official repository of federal election campaign finance information relating to Federal office candidates. Campaign reports are filed electronically and the information reported can be directly accessed here.
Step Two: Scroll down the page towards the bottom and click on the link for “House of Representatives Candidates.”
Step Three: The next page that appears lists all House candidates in order of totals raised for this election cycle. The list is topped by AOC, with Hakeem Jeffries and Mike Johnson both near the top. However, if you scroll down to the 18th-ranked you will see Eric Jones with $8.3 Million. Where did all this money come from?
CHAPTER ONE: Digging into the Details About Federal Candidates’ Supporters — Looking Beyond the Hype, Hyperbole, and Total B.S.
By F.E.C. Nerd
The U.S. Supreme Court’s Republican appointees negated virtually all of the campaign finance reform laws at the federal level over the past several decades. (Buckley v. Valeo; Citizens United; National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission.) They have left us with little protections against the excesses of extreme campaign spending by powerful monied interests in an attempt to literally “buy elections.”
There are some campaign contribution limits, but thanks to the court cases, there are many ways to circumvent those limits. What is left is campaign finance disclosure. We voters must use that one remaining tool to inform ourselves. So, I write this to help the reader with practical guidance to assist in determining the sources and likely motivations of the big-money players in our current election cycle.
I’ve been overwhelmed by the deluge of TV ads by Eric Jones, the challenger in our home district (California Congressional District 4). Sometimes the same tedious AI-generated ad appears on my TV screen as many as four times in a single program!! Not to mention, the wholly unsolicited SPAM texts from someone I haven’t given my number, or permission to fill my inbox. Plus, the paid canvassers delivering doorhangers despite my “No Soliciting” sign. So, I ask myself, WHERE IS ALL THAT MONEY COMING FROM? Perhaps you are wondering the same thing.
Here’s how to find the answers from the authoritative source — not some “never-heard-of-it- before” on-line website or slick campaign ad. Because my goal is to help you to ferret out the truth and then allow you to reach your own conclusions based upon the unvarnished facts, you do not need to “trust me” in terms of viewpoint. Just do your own research and decide for yourself. Ballots have just been mailed, early voting begins in the next few days and the candidates have debated on TV. (See here for the video of the debate, in case you missed it):
(From press release) In a televised debate hosted by KCRA on Wednesday, 4th District congressional candidate Eric Jones declared “I’m not from here.”
Jones, a venture capitalist, has claimed he moved to the 4th district in 2021 but in fact voted in San Francisco until 2025 and purchased his $4 million Napa home with a mortgage that described it as a second home. His shocking admission came at the end of a half-hour televised debate where Jones faced questions about his venture capital firm’s investments in companies fined hundreds of millions of dollars for harming consumers, his reversal on policy positions including his suggestion to sunset all federal programs including Medicare and Social Security, and whether he is truly a resident of the community he wants to serve in Congress. In his closing statement, Jones said, “I’m not from here”
Jones’ admission is in stark contrast to Congressman Mike Thompson, who was born, grew up, and still lives in our district. Thompson, a combat veteran and member of the powerful Ways and Means Committee in Congress, dominated the debate.
“Eric Jones couldn’t have said it better: he’s not from here, and he doesn’t know the needs of our community. While Eric furnishes his third home in Napa with half a million dollars worth of designer furniture, Mike Thompson has been showing up and delivering for our District to lower costs for families, protect our democracy, and put an end to this forever war that’s raising prices,” said Thomas Dowling, Mike Thompson for Congress Campaign Manager.
Congressman Thompson is a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, which has jurisdiction over health care, tax, trade, Social Security and income security issues. Congressman Thompson is the Ranking Member of the Tax Subcommittee and a senior member of the Health Subcommittee. He is also a member of the fiscally responsible Blue Dog Coalition and a combat veteran. To learn more about Congressman Mike Thompson visit here.
[Note: this letter first appeared in the Davis Enterprise, here. However, they did not have room to print the first paragraph, which the author asked to be included here].
Eric Jones has been touting his strict opposition to ‘corporate PACs’ over the course of the entire campaign. But Super PACs are worse than corporate PACs, because corporate PACs limit individual donations to $5,000, whereas Super PACs have no limit on individual donations. So Eric Jones, while sanctimoniously abjuring corporate PACs and attacking Thompson for accepting some donations from them, himself not only benefited from his (barely) former partners’ $3.9 million Super PAC, but also personally donated $10,000 to a Super PAC in support of the campaign of one of his tech cronies.
Eric Jones claims to be a progressive congressional candidate who wants to get money out of politics, but his actions speak much louder than his words.
Eric Jones was a big venture capitalist — a partner at Dragoneer Investments — until only one month before he declared for office. He received the vast majority of his outsized war chest from his network of AI/Crypto/tech-related executives and their financiers and his own venture capital fortune. He is also supported by a $3.93 million Super PAC largely funded by his long-term fellow Dragoneer venture capital partners/spouse. Dragoneer is a huge investor in tech and artificial intelligence.
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?
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.
