AT THE EPICENTER OF EVERYTHING QUITE DELICIOUS

With a complex and interconnected triad of central campaign messages, direct Democracy (Power to the People), Semi-Autonomy (District-Level Referendums), and Individualism (Traditional Liberalism), at the heart of our platform, it was predictable that the outcome wouldn't be stellar for our candidate--a fresh face on the political scene. We understood this going into the campaign season and set our target goal to take home 10% of the popular vote in this single-party (Democrat) enclave on the Northern California coast. When all was said and done, our candidate had captured 7% of the vote--dismal from a political point of view, yet still a viable start to our fledgling movement. With the rising specter of a growing collectivism pulsating across the world, spurred on through our digitization (Big Tech) and manipulation (Government), there is no greater need than now for the people to take back the power that was once theirs and to call out and punish the elite class for misusing technology (e.g. AI) against the people via an authoritarian-inspired, Big Government-Big Tech collusion.

Regardless of our less-than-remarkable performance at the polls, we learned several important lessons that should, indeed, help our newly-born political movement to make greater gains in future elections. 

1) The Inability to Drive Our Narrative - while our platform was built around the idea of changing the way we do local government, both the voters and the media were focused on several local ballot measures, which drove attention away from our broader message. In a single-party county and city, the party dictates those narratives, often less game-changing messages (e.g. Measure O) that they hype up, while they limit exposure to their grander strategy objectives that will have the greater impacts on the local community, often by using innocuous and unassailable phrases (e.g. "affordable housing") to deter challengers and debate. Delivering our narrative to a larger segment of voters will require something more eye-catching than a website or lawn sign. It will take a more hands-on approach.

2) Political endorsements rule the day - while we played the role of the antagonist throughout the campaign by challenging the establishment and the status quo, candidates like Scott Newsome, the eventual winner of the seat, quickly aligned himself with the political machine to win the endorsements of the major political players in the city.

3) Lack of Technology Demo - we felt that our inability to produce a direct democracy simulation and demo for voter interaction that allowed them to recognize to power of our technology vision never allowed us to properly convey its principle aspects and powerful features. We will be reaching out to the Swedish, Direct Democracy political party know as Direktdemokraterna in hopes of leveraging its internet platform (Demo mode, English language) to give the residents of Santa Cruz the opportunity to engage in a Direct Democracy simulation environment. Our hope is to have this to share and utilize during the 2024 campaign season and much of our success at the polls will depend on it.

4) Signage VENUES - we were only able to effectively post one of our two 4' x 6' Direct Democacy signs on a major traffic artery. Signs of this size are only allowed to be posted on private property and we were unable to find a willing participate to place our second sign at a high-traffic location. This was more than likely due the lack of name recognition of our candidate as well as the promotion of a direct democracy that, to many, remained too foreign a concept, making the property owners we solicited overly cautious and to avoid participating. These venue sites need to be cultivated much earlier in the campaign.

5) financial resources - our budget only allowed us to support a single post-card mailer delivered a week before the mail-in ballots arrived. Better-funded campaigns often delivered post-cards at two separate times: (a) just before mail-in ballots arrive and (b) just before the election. Yet, we did not feel that financial limitations were a critical factor in our candidate's loss, but were the first three lessons list above.