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Category: Web/Tech

  • 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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  • Eric Jones, Red-Boxing, & the AI Money Nobody’s Talking About

    And update to the series on the race for congress in California CD04 (Links below)

    By Judy Tipple

    [Reposted with permission of the author. See original at https://rosietheboomer.substack.com/p/eric-jones-red-boxing-and-the-ai]

    OK, I admit it… I’m a political nerd. Many years of campaigns, more FEC filings read than I’d like to admit. And I had never heard of “red-boxing” until a friend flagged it to me last week. Wait till you hear what it means — because once you see it, you can’t unsee it on every campaign website you visit.

    Before I get to that: credit where it’s due. Roberta Millstein at Davisite already dug up the core of Jones’s Dragoneer ties and his Super PAC connections. Read her full series here: Who is Eric Jones? A summary of the series. This piece adds a few new pieces to her picture.

    1. Red-Boxing: The website is talking to PACs, not to you

    Jones’s campaign site has a page — not in the main menu, you have to know where to look — that reads less like a pitch to voters and more like a memo to an ad-buyer. It tells you what you “need to see,” what you “need to hear,” on what timeline. That’s a known, legal-but-gray tactic called red-boxing: campaigns aren’t allowed to privately hand a Super PAC their ad copy, so instead they post it publicly and let the PAC “discover” it — no phone call required, no coordination on paper. It’s used by both parties nationwide, so it’s not unique to Jones. What is fair to point out: he’s built his brand on refusing PAC money, while his own site is doing PAC-facing work in plain sight. That is red-boxing.

    2. Follow the money, follow the name, follow the family

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  • Davis teen takes on America’s caregiver shortage, one front door at a time

    At 17, Davis Senior High School senior Dash Voskuhl built a caregiving startup called Tethr. He and his three co-founders apply to Y Combinator at the end of July.

    (From press release) Dash Voskuhl spent his summer mornings knocking on doors around Davis, selling window cleaning. At one house, the pitch turned into a different conversation. Voskuhl mentioned the caregiving app he was building on the side, and the woman at the door, in her 50s, went quiet. Then she told him about her mother, who has dementia.

    “That was the moment I knew I had to actually build this,” Voskuhl said.

    Voskuhl, a rising senior at Davis Senior High School, is the CEO and co-founder of Tethr, a Davis startup whose app connects families with vetted caregivers so anyone can book care on demand, the way they’d order an Uber. The company is pre-launch, and this month the team is applying to Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley accelerator whose early bets included Airbnb and DoorDash.

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  • Did Eric Jones’ wealthy donors help him advance to the General Election by funding his lesser known Republican opponents?

    (From press release) In an explosive story in The Press Democrat Friday morning, it was confirmed that Eric Jones’ wealthy donors spent more than $100,000 to split the Republican vote and guarantee that Eric Jones would make the general election. 

    The donors in question, George Dixit (Dean) and Rishi Dixit, are a married couple from Santa Monica and were the only two donors to Mandy Gushar, John McKenzie, and Sharon Brown. Gushar, McKenzie, and Brown maintained no social media presence and hosted no publicly advertised events. Each candidate hired the same campaign treasurer and their biggest campaign expense was the filing fee to get on the ballot. 

    Rishi Dixit also started and funded a SuperPAC, California Leadership Fund, that raised $75,000 attacking Raymond Riehle, the leading Republican candidate, in a variety of mailers and text messages. Riehle was endorsed by six county Republican central committees and was not attacked by any other candidates – just Jones’ donors.   Eric Jones defeated Raymond Riehle by just 1.5%. McKeznie, Gushar, and Brown received 10.4% of the vote combined.

    “This is another example of Eric Jones and his wealthy venture capitalist donors trying to buy a seat in Congress,” said Mike Thompson for Congress Campaign Manager, Thomas Dowling “80 percent of voters rejected Eric Jones’ message and we look forward to sending Eric back home to San Francisco in November.”

    Congressman Thompson was the top vote getter, beating Eric Jones by 19 points.  Despite having nearly $11 million in support, Congressman Thompson goes into the general election leading Eric Jones by a 2:1 margin.

    Read the full story here and below:

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  • The Sleeping Giant Is In Your District Too: Follow The Money, Part VI

    Grow California spent $1.5 million in my backyard. Then I found out they’re doing it all over the state. And the endgame isn’t Sacramento — it’s 2028.

    By Judy Tipple

    I’ve been following this money for months. In April, I wrote about the Silicon Valley venture capital network behind Eric Jones’s congressional campaign in CA-04 (Part I: Wrong Seat, Wrong Moment). When the same donor fingerprints showed up attacking a candidate in my own Assembly district, I kept pulling the thread (Part IV: They’re Doing It Again). What I found goes well beyond two races in the North Bay.

    The primary is over. The votes are counted. And now it’s time to show you the full picture, because if you live anywhere in California, this maybe happening in your backyard too.

    Here is the common thread running through all of it: tech and crypto money flowing into Democratic primaries, looking for candidates who won’t get in the way of their industry interests; who won’t tax their unrealized gains, who won’t put guardrails on AI, who won’t ask hard questions about data centers reshaping energy grids and water supplies across the state. They can’t do this through Republicans. Democrats hold 75 percent of the seats in both legislative chambers, and in a midterm year with a Republican in the White House, that’s not changing. So they’re doing it through us.

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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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  • The billionaire venture-capitalist backed Super PAC supporting Eric Jones cites faulty time travelers

    Mailer funded by the Super PAC “New Leadership Now.”

    Or maybe they just lie?

    The latest mailer funded by the “New Leadership Now” Super PAC boldly declares: “In 2019, House Democrats voted on impeachment. Mike Thompson voted No.” One big problem: Thompson in fact voted YES in 2019 — check, e.g., Wikipedia.

    So, what’s their evidence? Next to the above blatantly false claim — I want to say “blatant lie” — there is a footnote citation. Take a look at the footnote in tiny print and you will see two citations from… wait for it… 2017!! So, apparently, those news sources were time travelers who knew that Mike Thompson would vote “no” in 2019, except they were apparently very bad time travelers (or maybe they were very bad crystal ball readers??) because he voted “yes”.

    You will probably need to click to read these, but the first date 12/6/17 and the second is also 12/6/17

    Sorry to be sarcastic here, but this is really bad. Bad bad bad. And if Jones doesn’t denounce this blatantly false claim (i.e., lie) in his name, that’s on him.

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  • Super PAC has now poured over 1.1 million dollars into ads supporting Eric Jones

    The latest venture-capital funded mailer is downright Orwellian

    By Roberta Millstein

    Mailer received 27 April 2026. Annotated by the author.

    Eric Jones’s campaign to unseat Mike Thompson in Congressional District 4 has repeatedly promised not to take money from special interests and PACs.  As I have already documented in detail (see earlier articles here and here), that promise is essentially meaningless.  A former partner of the Dragoneer Investment Group, Jones has received large individual donations and repeated campaign advertising funded by massive donations to the New Leadership Now Super PAC from his fellow venture capitalists, including a huge donation from the family of Dragoneer’s founder, Marc Stad.

    Expenditures for ads in support of Eric Jones’s campaign (mailers, TV, internet, etc.) from New Leadership Now currently exceed 1.1 million dollars, as this screenshot from the FEC website shows [UPDATE: over $1.33 million as of May 9, 2026]:

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  • Eric Jones’s close ties to a Super PAC

    Jones criticizes Mike Thompson for taking PAC money, but is he being hypocritical?

    By Roberta Millstein

    Flyer in support of Eric Jones’s run for Congress, paid for by the New Leadership Now Super PAC

    Among the small deluge of flyers Davisites have received promoting Eric Jones’s candidacy for Congressional District 4, some may have noticed that one was different from the others: It indicated that it was paid for by a group called “New Leadership Now.”  Who is New Leadership Now, and what sort of connection does it have to Eric Jones, if any?  This article aims to shed a bit of light on these questions.  It is a follow-up to my earlier article discussing the direct campaign contributions from Jones’s former venture capitalist co-workers and other individuals from the high tech industry.

    New Leadership Now is registered with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) as a Super PAC.  What is a Super PAC?  Wikipedia has a helpful definition:

    Independent expenditure-only political action committees, commonly known as super PACs, are a type of political action committees (PACs) in the United States. Unlike traditional PACs, super PACs are legally allowed to fundraise unlimited amounts of money from individuals or organizations for the purpose of campaign advertising; however, they are not permitted to either coordinate with or contribute directly to candidate campaigns or political parties. However, in practice, restrictions on such coordination are considered flimsy and poorly enforced.[1]

    The unlimited expenditures coupled with not really knowing if the committees are actually coordinating with candidates make Super PACs controversial.  Eric Jones has touted his campaign as “Powered by People, Not Special Interests: Not a Dime from Corporate PACs”[2]  What I will describe below casts some serious doubt on that slogan, however.

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