Past Activities
In the first five months of 2026, we focused on advancing our pro-democracy agenda in conjunction with four distinct races:
Candidates for U.S. Congress in CA-19. Our team developed a list of questions for candidates in the primary election in CA-19. We presented these questions to the ISCC leadership group, and they proposed expanding the initiative by asking each of the Issue groups to submit two questions to the candidates. We readily agreed to participate in this collaborative effort and revised our questions accordingly. The questions from all of the Issue groups were sent out to the candidates in early May. Five of the seven candidates, including Democratic incumbent Jimmy Panetta and Democratic challenger Sean Dougherty, returned completed questionnaires. The completed questionnaires were emailed to the ISCC membership, along with a request to indicate whether any of the candidates should be endorsed by ISCC. Membership favored endorsing Sean Dougherty over Jimmy Panetta by roughly 54% to 45%. This fell short of the 60% majority of votes that were required for ISCC to formally endorse a candidate.
Our team’s position was that we would ideally like the two top vote-getters in the primary to be Jimmy Panetta and Sean Dougherty. We believed a November contest between these two candidates would provide us with the best opportunity to promote deeper public reflection on the key challenges currently facing our democracy.
Candidates for Governor of California. We would ideally have wanted the two top vote-getters in the primary to be Democrats so that the November election will allow us to focus more on underlying concerns about pro-democracy processes. However, our first priority was for at least one of the two top vote-getters to be a Democrat. Unfortunately, this race proved sufficiently chaotic that we could not identify a useful way to contribute.
Candidates for U.S. Congress in CA-13 and CA-22. These are two highly competitive districts in the Central Valley. This November, the incumbent Democrat in CA-13 will be facing a strong Republican challenge, and the incumbent Republican in CA-22 will be facing a strong Democratic challenge. We would very much like Democrats to emerge victorious in November in both these districts. In principle, the most effective ways to influence electoral outcomes in districts that are distant from us are: donations, fundraising, phone-banking, and post-carding. We did not take direct action leading up to the primary election, but we began planning to collaborate with other Indivisible Santa Cruz County groups to support the Democratic candidates in November.
In 2025, the Restore Democracy team focused our attention on passage of Proposition 50, the response by California to the mid-decade gerrymandering in Texas ordered by Donald Trump in an effort to rig the 2026 congressional elections in favor of Republicans. Our actions included a variety of efforts to encourage Californians to vote in favor of Prop. 50. We sent out postcards to voters, wrote letters to the editor, and carried out tabling initiatives in a variety of settings. In addition, in response to a request from the Santa Cruz for Bernie group, we sent a representative to their endorsement meeting to argue in favor of Prop 50. After the presentation and responses by the presenter to a series of questions, the group voted to endorse Proposition 50. In the November election, Prop. 50 passed by a large margin.