Eric Jones’s venture capital colleagues at Dragoneer surely know what they would get in him as a member of Congress. Why don’t his would-be constituents?
By Liz Russell
When Eric Jones says he needs two to four years to learn the ropes of being a congressman, and to figure out only after he’s elected whom to meet with in the communities he wants to represent, how can voters trust him to serve our interests? Mike Thompson needed no such grace period (or $20mil in campaign funding), because he put in the work from the start. He dropped out of high school, served in the Army in wartime, and came home to earn his GED and become the first in his family to go to college. He worked as a winery mechanic, keeping the presses and bottling lines running, and from there won a seat in the state legislature while raising a family in his hometown of St. Helena. Long before he was a lawmaker, he was one of the working people Eric Jones now claims to speak for.
Consider today’s letter in the Napa Valley Register from one of Jones’s supporters, Richard Tippitt. He describes Jones as someone who grew up on food stamps, then recounts that when Jones was asked whether he’d still run if he weren’t wealthy, he said no, “at least not yet.” What does that even mean?
Many of us grew up in households facing similar economic and familial hardships (some even unspeakable), and our response wasn’t to pillage the American economy and rip off Medicare and seniors through venture capital. Nor did we then run for Congress claiming to oppose the very system that made us rich. That is hypocritical at best.
Eric Jones is not the candidate he purports to be.
By Paul Gepts
I am particularly disappointed that Congressman Ro Khanna chose to endorse candidate Eric Jones, a Fall 2026 candidate in the California CD04. I am an independent voter and, since April 2026, I have done my homework about the candidates involved, thus covering both the Primary Election (June) and Mid-term Election (November). I attended the town hall meetings of video calls organized by the main candidates (Eric Jones on 09/19 and 10/26; and Mike Thompson 0n 09/01) and the debate between these candidates organized by the LWV in Woodland on 10/08. I also downloaded the candidates’ financial statements to the Federal Election Commission. I have no connection to either campaign, but as a citizen I believe I should become informed and engaged.
Eric Jones is not the candidate he purports to be, a Democratic progressive representing the fourth district of this state. His link to this district is tenuous at best: he owns a house in Napa (in addition to a house in San Francisco), but has never been a candidate for any office at any level in this district. Actually, he voted in San Francisco until 2025. According to FEC filings, most of his funding comes from outside the district. The legal representation of his campaign is provided by the Rutan & Tucker law firm with offices in Newport Beach (47th district) and San Francisco (11th district). When I questioned his link to this district at a town hall meeting, he immediately replied by calling me a “plant”. Let it be very clear that I am not a plant in any way, as mentioned earlier. Instead, Jones’s reaction shows he does not tolerate informed questions and does not have the right temperament to be the representative of a congressional district as diverse as the 4th.
“We need to use our strengths. That’s intelligence and that’s projecting kinetic force all across the world to accomplish our military objectives.” — Eric Jones
“We should be seeking always to mitigate nuclear risk from Iran. But we can do this with tactical strikes every 3 months, every 6 months.” — Eric Jones
So Eric Jones was supposed to be a progressive, but his website said nothing at all about foreign policy, Gaza or the Iran War, or about universal health care. This was my first impression of Eric Jones. After digging a little, I found that Jones was a wealthy venture capitalist with absolutely no political background. No elected office, no appointed position, no activist history – not even a letter to the editor. He had stepped down from his partnership in Dragoneer Investments only a month before he started to run. His long-term partners and a spouse at Dragoneer had set up a Super PAC to support Jones’ candidacy five months before Jones left the firm to run for office. That Super PAC now weighs in at $6 million. I learned that this firm, Dragoneer Investments, had been a big investor in Israeli tech, and had recently moved heavily into AI, with massive investments in Anthropic and Open AI, and into defense industries with major investments in SpaceX and Helsing. And Jones had 756 entries on his FEC filings of individual donations of $3,500 or more – mostly from a network of partners and top executives at high tech companies and their venture capital, hedge fund, and private equity financiers from the tech and financial hubs across the country.
As the weeks and months rolled by, the platform on Eric Jones’ website started to shift, twist, and turn. He soon became opposed to “unnecessary wars”. He was in favor of building AI data centers “here and not abroad”, pre-empting states’ rights to regulate AI, and federal subsidies for AI and AI infrastructure. Then he had “always been against data centers”.
I was concerned about Jones’ foreign policy position, given his public reticence and given the interests of his donors, so I looked forward to the first debate between Jones and Mike Thompson. I wanted to see what Jones would have to say in public, where his donors could hear it.
Eric Jones has finally come out with a specific foreign policy statement, and it’s chilling. During the KCRA debate, Eric Jones declared:
Recently, I’ve had people ask me why it’s so bad that the Eric Jones campaign is spending millions of out-of-district dollars. I was surprised by the question at first, but since a few have asked it, here is my attempt to answer, with links to many of our previous Davisite articles. Please share this article to help get the word out before Nov 3.
10. It raises the bar for political spending. Jones $15M contributions to his campaign — to buy a seat in the House — are record-setting in CA and make his congressional campaign spending one of the highest in the country. It’s a waste of money that could be used on other things and makes it harder for ordinary citizens to run for office. Someone that wasteful of money and resources would not make a prudent candidate.
8. Jones is supported by a Super PAC, New Leadership Now, of associates from his former firm, Dragoneer, where he was a venture capitalist (not a “businessman” as he likes to call himself) for 12 years, 8 as partner. Jones misrepresented this from the very beginning, claiming not to take corporate PAC money, but to date NLN has spent more than $5 M on Jones’s campaign. Super PACs, which are not supposed to coordinate with campaigns, are typically shady — this one, which has supported only Jones, was formed even before he declared his candidacyand while Jones was still an active partner at Dragoneer.
Eric Jones Has Now Donated More Than $15 MILLION to his Campaign!
By F.E.C. Nerd
Late yesterday (Friday, 10/23/26) Eric Jones’ campaign filed yet another report disclosing even more donations. This was on top of new reporting the prior day (10/22/26) when Eric Jones’ campaign committee filed its required “Pre-General” report. That is the final “full” report prior to the election. It covers the period from the last “full” report (which was 7/1/26 to 9/30/26) through 10/14/2026. In addition, certain special types of reports are required within 24 hours of triggering activities — such as the one filed yesterday. What do all these reports reveal?
Eric Jones’ campaign contributions (boosted by his own $15+ Millions) have now surpassed even Hakeem Jeffries among House candidates nationwide!
And that doesn’t even include last night’s filing. Follow along to see the money trail. Looking at Eric Jones’ campaign filings since the last big report (through 9/30/26 — filed on 10/15/26) there are three. The two main ones will be reviewed below; those are the two most recent.
Less than a week ago, I wrote an article here about the $10 million dollars that Eric Jones, congressional candidate in CA’s District 04, had dumped into his own campaign. That contribution made headlines across the district as the largest contribution ever made in a CA congressional campaign, an amount that, together with large-donor out-of-district donations to Jones campaign, put him at #10 in spending across the entire country (remembering that there are 435 seats open and an unknown number of candidates running for those seats).
But little did any of us know about another contribution, just surfaced on the FEC site, from Jones: $4,800,000.00 on October 1, for a grand total of $14,864,133.10 — yes, almost $15 million dollars. There is no other way to see this but as this recently-resigned Silicon Valley venture capitalist, former partner at Dragoneer Investment Group, trying to buy a congressional seat.
$10 million was eye-popping. At $15 million, your jaw should be on the ground and your head should should be swiveling on its neck (and don’t ask me what comes after that).
Fellow citizens of District 4: Californians have a proud history of rejecting multi-millionaires and billionaires trying to buy their way into positions of power, knowing that these people do not have the interests of ordinary citizens in mind.
Vote for Mike Thompson, born and raised in our district, who is hardworking, honorable, and trustworthy.
Here is the screenshot from the FEC showing the Oct 1 donation and his year-to-date total:
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.
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.
