Mike Thompson

On a morning in late April, congressional candidate Eric Jones and his chief of staff ducked into Sonoma’s Best Mercantile, in the northeast corner of downtown. It was time for coffee.

The whole point of Jones’ being in Sonoma on a Sunday was to meet and chat with as many residents as he could find, so he broke the ice while ordering. “Are you local?” he asked his barista.

“Yeah,” she said with a big smile. “You?”

“I’m running for Congress,” Jones said, seeming to invite a response.

“How fun!” the young barista observed before taking the candidate’s order. “That’s so exciting!”

Jones’ run in California’s 4th District has indeed generated excitement, if you judge by the energy — and money — the former venture capitalist is pouring into unseating fellow Democrat Mike Thompson, the party’s standard bearer from the North Bay as he seeks his 15th term in the U.S. House of Representatives.

But fun? That might be a stretch.

Thompson, 75, entered the race with huge surpluses in name recognition, endorsements and political track record. If Jones, 35, is to make it through the top-two June 2 primary — either to square off against Thompson once more in November, or oust him and face a different rival — he knows it will take a huge effort.

The challenger has plunged into the assignment. He estimates that his campaign has hosted at least 16 town halls and knocked on 200,000 doors thus far in the sprawling district — which includes all of Napa, Yolo, Colusa, Yuba and Sutter counties, and parts of Sonoma, Lake, Sacramento and Placer counties, after being redrawn in the wake of California’s Prop 50.

That legwork was on display April 26 as Jones and his team allowed a Press Democrat reporter to shadow them throughout a day of campaigning.

It started with door-to-door canvassing, in a neighborhood of single-family homes just a few blocks east of the Sonoma Plaza. Door knocking can be less than fruitful, but Jones wound up spending 13 minutes on his first stop on East Napa Street, at around 9:30 a.m. On the other side of the doorway was a man in his late 60s — a Republican, as it turned out.

The man talked mostly about immigration policy, a subject on which they didn’t see eye-to-eye. (At the candidate’s request, the reporter agreed to stay out of view for these home visits.) But by the time Jones walked away, he said, the resident had pledged his vote.

Other porches in the neighborhood were hit and miss. Some people didn’t come to the door. Some interactions were fleeting. One woman who just turned 90 said she liked Thompson.

“I asked why,” Jones reflected. “She didn’t really have an answer.”

His campaign is targeting areas of “likely voter density” in Democratic-leaning neighborhoods across the district, Jones and his campaign chief of staff, Nick Sanitsky, said.

“Sometimes you get a whole community of Democratic voters, like in Sonoma,” Jones said. “Yuba City? Not so much.”

Outside of one “gun situation,” he said, without elaborating, the door knocking has gone well.

Caffeine, Altoids, community engagement

After Jones hit a dozen houses in Sonoma, Sanitsky told him it was time to move on. Sanitsky is the CEO of Jones’ nonprofit, the American Dream Institute, which consults with content creators and journalists on data-backed messaging.

From there, it was off to a coffee run, then to a scheduled town hall. Neither of them would be isolated incidents on this day, in a campaign fueled largely by caffeine, Altoids and community engagement.

The morning town hall was at the Sonoma Community Center. When Thompson held a similar event in the same building seven weeks earlier, it was in the center’s main auditorium. Not so for the challenger, who was relegated to a smaller side room.

There were about 50 folding chairs waiting for Jones in the space, arranged by campaign workers before he got there. They weren’t enough. As the candidate chatted up guests before the presentation, others streamed in and staff added to the seating.

“I grew up in a 750-square-foot home,” Jones began.

He went on to recount aspects of his childhood, some of them familiar for those who have seen his television spots. His father was a disabled veteran. (He served in the British Army.) The family relied on government assistance to get by. Jones wound up getting a scholarship to Yale University. He also brought up another experience that has helped shape his views: his son’s congenital heart defect, which required a novel medical procedure.

“The first bill was $1.6 million,” Jones said. “In the end, it wound up being $60,000.”

Those life lessons, as Jones likes to say, showed him the best and the worst of American governance. His family couldn’t have thrived without public aid. But the help often falls short for working families.

“I bring healthcare experience. I bring messaging experience,” Jones told the audience. “And I bring a promise — I will never take PAC money, and I will be an independent voice to do what’s best for my community, and my country.”

Jones has hammered the incumbent for his reliance on political action committees created by corporations, or by trade groups in industries like healthcare and energy, and has pledged not to accept that sort of money. But his promise has been sharply questioned lately, especially by Mike Thompson’s supporters. That includes a series of posts on Davisite, a multi-author blog website focused on the community of Davis.

A super PAC called New Leadership Now has raised $1.8 million and has spent more than $440,000 on campaign advertising for Jones. It is primarily funded by Elisa Stad, wife of Marc Stad, founder of the Dragoneer Investment Group — Jones’ former employer.

Jones told The Press Democrat he didn’t know about New Leadership Now’s existence until the mailers began to arrive.

That issue didn’t come up at the Sonoma town hall. But Jones fielded a lot of tough questions.

One attendee asked him why he’s running for Congress, rather than starting with a local or state office.

“The reason is Donald Trump,” Jones said. “I knew we as Democrats wouldn’t be ready for Trump 2. What I didn’t expect is that we would actually get worse at fighting Donald Trump. And we have.”

The hardest line of questioning came from a local man who pointed out Thompson’s vocal criticism of the Trump administration. How, the man wondered, would Jones propose to be more impactful as a freshman congressperson with no seniority?

“We are different,” Jones insisted. “I would not have voted for a trillion-dollar defense bill.”

He was referring to the National Defense Authorization Act, which appropriated $900 billion in defense spending in December. A slim majority of Democrats joined Republicans to pass that bill. Thompson, a top Democrat on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, overseeing taxation, was one of those yes votes.

The Thompson Tunnel

One woman in the audience had heard enough praise of the incumbent.

“I am so frustrated with Mike Thompson,” she told Jones, unprompted. “I’ve gone to town halls. There’s no there there. Frankly, you’ve won me over.”

The comment got a round of applause, which was generally indicative of Jones’ reception in Sonoma. People seemed eager to hear what he had to say. His one-liners got laughs.

The challenger’s team had leaned a dozen “Eric Jones for Congress” signs along two walls of the meeting room. They were all snapped up afterward; staff had to unload more from a truck.

After grabbing to-go sandwiches and another coffee, it was off to Calistoga for another town hall.

Jones was joined in the car by his wife, Rachel, an architect. She’s a common sight at his campaign events, and not a passive one. They met when they were 22. Eric Jones was “a real shy kid,” he said, and he credits Rachel with making him a more confident public speaker. She tends to function as official timekeeper at events, moving things along if Eric gets bogged down.

Calistoga is a smaller town than Sonoma, and the town hall in the community center there was a smaller event. Attendance: 14

But the tenor was much the same.

“Who is happy with the Democratic Party these days?” Jones asked. Not a single hand went up.

Calistogans asked him about the national debt. It’s among “the greatest problems facing our country,” Jones said, suggesting a freeze in the defense budget.

They also asked about his former job a venture capitalist. He helped fund healthcare companies, with a hand in forming business plans, hiring employees and selling products, he said.

(In a recent attack ad, Thompson accused Jones of having invested in gambling, big oil and a company investigated for preying on seniors. Jones countered that the ad refers to investments made by Dragoneer, and that he had no personal connection to that money.)

Then came another version of the big question: Why should a voter trade Mike Thompson’s decades of experience for your energy and enthusiasm?

“I think we need some new blood in there,” Jones said, “instead of the same old same old.”

That has been both Jones’ starting point and his north star in this race. Thompson is one of 60 Democrats currently occupying House seats who are in their 70s and 80s, a particularly sensitive flashpoint for the party after former President Joe Biden’s advanced age became a focal point before his exit from the 2024 race.

And frustration with incumbents, regardless of their age, is skyrocketing as government gridlock has slowed meaningful lawmaking — and as Trump has, in the eyes of many Democrats, run roughshod over the U.S. Constitution.

Jones is hoping his youth and novelty are seen as assets among 4th District voters. In addition to Thompson and Jones, the race features six Republicans and one independent. Under California rules, the top two finishers, regardless of party, will face off in November.

After the Calistoga town hall, Jones completed the loop back to Napa, where he and Rachel, purchased a home in 2021 and now live. He had several more more hours of canvassing ahead of him.

On the way back down valley, the campaign caravan passed through St. Helena — where Mike Thompson grew up, and still lives. The outskirts of the idyllic town feature a gauntlet of campaign signs for the native son.

To the insurgents, it is “The Thompson Tunnel.”

In the district’s newly added communities — from the foothills of Placer County to the farmland surrounding Marysville and Yuba City — the Jones campaign is working with a clean slate of voters who don’t know much about the District 4 incumbent.

Here in Wine Country, the visible and vocal support for Mike Thompson is everywhere, another reminder Eric Jones remains very much an underdog.

You can reach Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or [email protected]. On X (Twitter) @Skinny_Post.