I entered politics as a nonpartisan at the beginning of 2022, re-registered as a Republican the day after the 2022 California primary, and spent the next four years trying to help build the kind of political organization Republicans had long said was needed. I ran for Congress, served inside the party apparatus, assisted political campaigns, and organized thousands of voter contacts. Somewhere along the way, I learned that getting people to knock on doors, although hard, was easier than getting an institution to confront itself.
Tim O’Reilly, former chair of the Republican Party of Los Angeles County (LAGOP), used to say something that always stuck with me: “We do a great job of driving away the good ones, Steve.”
What makes the line linger is the irony behind it. Tim was the primary reason I became as active as I did in the Republican Party. He inspired and motivated me. He made me believe the odds could be overcome. As one party member often put it, “He’s the sort of leader you could follow into battle.”
I would hear him speak at California Republican Assembly, Republican Women, Young Republican, and LAGOP meetings. Although the location and audience changed, and the speech varied around the edges, the essential message did not.
Republicans could keep pointing fingers at one another and complaining about Democrats and the direction of the state, or they could come together, get active, and do the hard work of changing it. The party needed people willing to show up, work alongside one another, and take responsibility for making a difference.
I listened. More importantly, I believed the premise behind what he was saying. If enough serious people showed up, did the work, and took responsibility for fixing what was broken, the party could get better. Organizations, after all, are shaped by the people inside them.
Better habits, stronger systems, and disciplined work can produce a better institution.
That idea made sense to me because it was how I had approached most things in my life. If something was not working, diagnose the problem. If a system was weak, build a stronger one. If an organization lacked infrastructure, create it. If people needed help, organize people who could provide it.
Four years later, I still believe all of that.
Before I Was a Republican
Oddly enough, my story in Republican politics does not begin with the Republican Party.
Community work had always mattered to me. When I was in college, I spent time mentoring young people from South Central Los Angeles and Echo Park, trying in whatever small way I could to encourage them to see possibilities beyond the circumstances around them.
As careers, marriage, children, and the ordinary demands of adulthood accumulated, doing that kind of work consistently became harder, but the instinct to serve never went away.
I would eventually discover that my professional life offered another way to stay connected to the community and continue helping people. Working with businesses, property owners, neighborhood groups, and residents throughout Los Angeles County, I began to see more clearly how decisions made by government shape everyday life.
Working in real estate teaches you quickly that government is not an abstraction. Someday, a zoning decision, permitting delay, struggling commercial corridor, crime problem, housing shortage, or a bad regulation arrives on somebody’s doorstep.
A public policy debate taking place miles away becomes the rent someone cannot afford, the business someone cannot open, or the neighborhood where someone no longer feels comfortable walking day or night.
The lockdowns in 2020 sharpened that awareness for me. They exposed how quickly decisions made by government could reach into nearly every part of daily life, from whether a business could stay open to whether a family could keep earning a living.
Coming out of that period, I found myself thinking more seriously about public service and whether simply observing those decisions from the outside was enough.
By then, the consequences were no longer abstract either. Working families were watching prices rise. Small businesses had been battered. People were worried about jobs, public safety, and whether the communities where they had built their lives still offered the same promise they once had.
That was when I decided to run for Congress in 2022. I believed my community deserved better than politics as usual and that public officials should be judged by whether they solved problems and delivered results. I also believed my experience in business, real estate, and community work had given me something useful to contribute.
What matters, particularly in light of everything that came later, is that I did not run as a Republican.
I went into the 2022 race believing that voters were increasingly frustrated with both major parties and might be ready to consider something outside the usual partisan divide. So I ran in California’s 36th Congressional District as a No Party Preference candidate.
On the June 7 primary ballot, I appeared alongside Democrat incumbent Ted Lieu, four Republicans, one other Democrat, and another No Party Preference candidate.
I was not trying to position myself as somehow above politics. I simply had never accepted the idea that every belief I held needed to fit neatly inside a partisan identity. I thought I could be judged on my ideas, my experience, and what I wanted to accomplish.
Boy, was I wrong.
Running for office changed my understanding of how American politics actually works. It exposed me to something that seems obvious in retrospect but feels very different when you experience it firsthand: American politics is deeply tribal.
Voters sort candidates. Candidates sort themselves. Donors, activists, consultants, political organizations, and the media all want to know where you fit. Party affiliation becomes shorthand for an entire collection of assumptions about what you believe, whom you support, and which side you belong to.
That experience taught me quickly that choosing not to identify with a political party did not remove me from the partisan system; it simply left voters without the political shorthand they were already using to make sense of the race.
The results made that difficult to ignore. I finished seventh in an eight-candidate field with 1,180 votes, ahead of only the other No Party Preference candidate. Every Democrat and Republican in the race received more than 6,000 votes, while even the lowest-finishing Republican received 7,351, more than six times my total.
I came away convinced that the party designation beside a candidate’s name carried far more weight with voters than I had understood going into the race. That realization did not make me enamored with tribal politics. It simply forced me to acknowledge that refusing to choose a tribe did not make the tribes disappear.
So, on June 8, 2022, the day after the primary, I re-registered as a Republican. The decision was deliberate. If I was going to remain engaged in politics, I wanted to do it within the party whose principles were closer to my own.
But I also believed that joining a party meant accepting some responsibility for what that party became. I did not believe loyalty meant blindly defending every decision made by party members. I believed it meant taking the party, its principles, and its own rules seriously.
If I was going to become a Republican, I wanted to do more than join the party. I wanted to help make it better.
I Took the Invitation Seriously
Once I registered as a Republican, I had a fairly basic thought: a political party could not function on elected officials and candidates alone. It also depended on volunteers and organizations outside its formal structure to recruit people, develop leaders, organize communities, and keep the machinery running between elections.
So, I started looking for Republican organizations in my area.
Finding those organizations was harder than I expected. But once I did, I started showing up. I became involved with the South Bay CRA, the South Bay Republican Women, the Los Angeles County Young Republicans, and the Los Angeles Hispanic Republican Club. I attended meetings and events whenever and wherever I could.
I began learning Republican politics from all angles. Through CRA, Republican Women, Young Republicans, College Republicans, and the campaigns around them, I met activists, consultants, club presidents, central committee members, candidates, and volunteers who had spent years trying to build and sustain Republican organizations across Los Angeles County.
What had once looked like a political party from the outside began to reveal itself as an entire ecosystem of organizations, relationships, and personalities. It was during this period that I repeatedly heard Tim speak.
My first LAGOP meeting was in May 2023, and by then I had begun to see participation in the party as something more than attending meetings or joining clubs. To me, involvement meant responsibility.
If Republican organizations were weak, strengthen them. If there were not enough volunteers, recruit them. If candidates lacked support, build systems to support them. If the party was not reaching neighborhoods, go into the neighborhoods.
I had joined the party believing it could be improved, and I was increasingly convinced that the only legitimate way to complain about what was missing was to help build it.
By 2024, I was back on a congressional ballot, this time with an “R” beside my name. I ran in California’s 43rd Congressional District against Maxine Waters, two other Democrats, and another Republican, finishing second in the March primary and advancing to the November general election.
There, I posted the second-highest vote total ever by a Republican running against Waters, drew 46 percent of my support from non-Republicans, and saw Republican registration in the district rise by 12 percent over the course of the campaign.
That campaign taught me more about the mechanics of politics than any meeting ever could. Raising money was difficult. Recruiting volunteers was difficult. Keeping a campaign functioning day after day was difficult. Getting voters to pay attention was difficult, and persuading people who did not already agree with you was harder still.
It also taught me how wide the gap could be between talking about political infrastructure and actually building it.
After the election, I moved deeper into the party apparatus. In January 2025, I was elected to the LAGOP Executive Board, began serving on the 66th Assembly District Republican Central Committee (66ADRCC), and became a delegate to the California Republican Party (CAGOP). I also started working more closely with candidates and helping on campaigns, which gave me a view of the Republican Party I never could have had simply by attending meetings a few years earlier.
There was an irony in moving deeper into the party apparatus. The more titles and positions I accumulated, the less interested I became in holding them.
What increasingly mattered to me was whether we were building something durable: volunteers who could be mobilized, precincts that were organized, candidates who did not have to recreate an operation from scratch every election cycle, and systems that could survive long after the people holding party offices had moved on.
That conviction became the foundation of CSAD66, my effort to build a community-first organization focused on developing long-term Republican infrastructure across California’s 66th Assembly District.
The Work Most Pretend to Be Doing
The concept behind CSAD66 was never about vanity. It was about building something durable. Los Angeles County has hundreds of local elected offices: city councils, school boards, community college boards, water districts, and other local bodies that make decisions affecting daily life, even as national politics consumes most of the public’s attention.
If Republicans wanted to compete seriously, complaining about registration and turnout numbers was not enough. We needed a repeatable system for recruiting volunteers, organizing precincts, sharing information, supporting candidates, and maintaining a local operation between elections.
I did not see an operation being built at the necessary scale, so I began trying to build one myself. I identified target races and organized dozens of volunteers. Together, we knocked on thousands of doors and made tens of thousands of phone calls.
Our slogans reflected how uncomplicated the philosophy was: “WALK. KNOCK. TALK.” and “DOORS WIN WARS.”
It was while doing that work that I began to notice how prevalent it had become for political activity to be performed for an audience. A photograph from an event, a picture with a candidate, a handful of volunteers holding signs, or a social media post about “doing the work” could create the impression of a thriving grassroots operation.
What those images could not tell you was how many voters had actually been contacted, how many volunteers had been recruited and retained, how many precincts had been organized, or whether anything would still exist after the election was over.
And that was what I liked about the field work we were doing. It was verifiable. Either someone knocked on the door or they didn’t. Either the call was made or it wasn’t. Our activity was logged and counted in Vottiv and Campaign Sidekick.
A photograph could create the appearance of work. But verifiable numbers told you whether the work had actually been done.
The South Bay was supposed to become our proof of concept: build locally, learn what worked, create systems, retain volunteers, develop neighborhood leaders, and then scale the model across Los Angeles County. It was the kind of Republican Party I thought Tim and others had been asking people like me to help build.
But the deeper I moved into the party apparatus, the more I discovered that organization was only one part of political life. Running alongside it was another kind of politics, one shaped by personalities, relationships, institutional sensitivities, and rules that often appeared far firmer on paper than they did when someone was actually asked to enforce them.
When Rules Meet Relationships
This past June, LAGOP-endorsed Republican candidate Mike Mauno ran for Torrance City Council District 3 against Democrat incumbent Asam Sheikh. Former Torrance mayor and councilmember Frank Scotto, a LAGOP member who sits on the 66th Assembly District Republican Central Committee, publicly endorsed Sheikh.
To my surprise, district committee leadership took no formal action, and the matter was not even discussed at a committee meeting until after the election was over.
I believed the circumstances raised a legitimate question under LAGOP’s provisions governing party loyalty, so I followed the process set forth in the bylaws. I gathered the evidence, documented what I had seen, and brought the matter before the LAGOP Executive Board.
I was not asking anyone to begin with a predetermined conclusion. I expected the organization to examine the conduct under its own rules and reach one.
That distinction matters because some people later characterized the controversy as a personality dispute. It was never principally about whether I liked Frank Scotto, whether Frank liked me, or whether two people in South Bay Republican politics happened to find themselves on opposite sides of an argument.
The question was institutional: what does a rule mean if the organization responsible for enforcing it is unwilling to complete the process when doing so becomes uncomfortable?
In my conversations with LAGOP Chair Roxanne Hoge, I was repeatedly told the matter would be addressed, but the timetable kept moving. At first, she told me she needed a ruling from the chair of the Bylaws and Rules Committee. I obtained that ruling. Then I was told the matter would be addressed after the June 2 primary.
June 2 came and went, and nothing occurred.
When I continued asking about it, the explanations changed. The November election now required the party’s full attention. There were other members, I was told, whose conduct was more serious. At one point, Roxanne told me that Sheikh had removed Scotto’s endorsement after LAGOP endorsed Mauno.
I had evidence to the contrary.
Over time, my frustration stopped being about the endorsement itself. Reasonable people can interpret rules differently, and I could have accepted a decision that went against what I believed if the process had actually produced one.
What troubled me was something more fundamental: the possibility that interpretation and enforcement could depend on relationships, status, and institutional convenience.
Once I began seeing the issue in those terms, I started noticing the same pattern elsewhere.
Same Fight, Different County
I initially thought what happened in Torrance might be an isolated dispute. Until I looked east to San Bernardino County.
In September 2023, the San Bernardino County Sentinel reported on a growing dispute inside the San Bernardino County Republican Party over prominent Republicans supporting Democrats against Republican candidates. At the center of that dispute was Curt Hagman, a former chair of the county Republican Party and a member of the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors.
The story reached back to the 2022 election. That year, Republican Mike Cargile advanced from the primary to face Democrat incumbent Norma Torres in California’s 35th Congressional District. Hagman nevertheless endorsed Torres. The endorsement came after Torres had supported Hagman over Democrat Connie Leyva in Hagman’s own 2022 race for county supervisor.
But the Sentinel was not simply looking backward. With the 2024 election cycle taking shape, the paper further reported that Republican Central Committee members had confirmed that Hagman and other prominent Republicans had already endorsed Norma Torres again for the coming election.
In addition, Hagman had also endorsed Torres’ son, Robert Torres, a Democrat running for State Assembly in the 53rd District. At the same time, Cargile was preparing to challenge Norma Torres again, while Republican Nick Wilson had entered the Assembly race against Robert Torres.
Apparently, the issue came to a head at the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee meeting on September 14, 2023. Hagman was asked directly why he was endorsing Robert Torres when a Republican, Nick Wilson, was running for the same seat.
His explanation was striking because it centered on relationships and reciprocity rather than party affiliation. Hagman recalled his longstanding relationship with Norma Torres, pointed to work she had done that he believed benefited San Bernardino County, and then explained the political history behind his support.
“She stood up and endorsed me over Connie Leyva,” the Sentinel quoted him as saying. Hagman said that, consequently, he had endorsed Torres. He also acknowledged endorsing Robert Torres after the younger Torres entered the Assembly race, explaining that he had done so before knowing that Wilson would run.
Republican committee members then raised the party’s own rules. Cargile cited provisions governing members who support candidates of another party, while other members argued that Republicans seeking party support should not be backing Democrats against Republican candidates.
The dispute was not really about whether Hagman was entitled to have a friendship or working relationship with Torres. Of course he was. The question was whether those relationships could take precedence over standards the organization expected Republicans to follow when one of their own candidates was on the ballot.
What made the San Bernardino case particularly relevant to me was that this was not a single endorsement in a single election. Hagman had supported Norma Torres over Cargile in 2022 and had already committed his support to Torres again for 2024. He had also extended that support to her son in a separate race where another Republican was running.
Different county. Different personalities. Different relationships. But the underlying question was remarkably familiar: what happens when a political party’s written rules collide with the personal relationships of the people expected to follow them?
A political party cannot expect its members to erase friendships across party lines. But once it writes rules governing support for opposing candidates, those rules should be applied consistently. When the same conduct produces outrage in one case and accommodation in another, members begin to wonder whether the rules reflect principle or convenience.
I began to suspect there was something much larger at work.
What Does the Republican Label Even Mean Anymore?
In 2024, LAGOP member Elaine Alaniz raised another version of the same problem, this time involving the party’s own voter guide. Her question was simple: why were Democrats being recommended to Republican voters?
One of the candidates she identified was Kelsey Lino, who was running for Los Angeles Community College District Seat 7 in the November 2024 election. LAGOP did not formally endorse Lino, but its voter guide listed her as a recommended candidate.
The guide’s legend made the distinction explicit: an asterisk meant a candidate was “not endorsed but recommended by LAGOP.” Lino appeared on the guide with that designation.
What made Elaine’s concern more pointed was Lino’s political background. DSA-LA had described her in its own voter guide as a “fellow DSA comrade.”
The explanation Elaine received from LAGOP leadership drew a technical distinction. The party could not formally endorse a Democrat, she was told, but in a race where no Republican was running, it could recommend one.
I understood the distinction. But I am not convinced the average Republican voter holding a Republican Party voter guide does.
Most voters do not parse the difference between “endorsed” and “recommended.” They see an official Republican Party voter guide with a candidate’s name printed on it. Whatever the internal terminology, the message is clear: the party is recommending this candidate to Republican voters.
Elaine returned to the issue in 2026 because, in her view, the problem was larger than any single candidate. Her concern was with the mechanism itself.
If the party could recommend Democrats whenever no Republican was running, then the issue was no longer simply who appeared on a particular voter guide. It was what an official Republican recommendation was supposed to mean in the first place.
I began looking at the question differently. If there was no Republican in a race, the party was under no obligation to choose among the remaining candidates. It could simply leave the race blank and allow Republican voters to make their own judgment.
Eventually, that thought sharpened into a more pointed question: when did the Republican Party of Los Angeles County become the “Least Harmful Democrat” Party of Los Angeles County?
There is a reasonable argument on the other side. A center-right voter may sometimes prefer one Democrat over another, particularly in a nonpartisan race, and political organizations routinely make pragmatic judgments when no candidate fully reflects their principles.
My objection was not that such judgment could never be legitimate.
However, if circumstances can justify recommending someone outside the party, then party loyalty is not absolute. Judgment exists. And once judgment exists, the institution has to explain who gets to exercise it, under what circumstances, and why that discretion is acceptable in one case but potentially sanctionable in another.
The question, then, was no longer whether judgment existed. It was who got to exercise it.
Who Gets to Exercise Judgment?
That question recently came into focus for me, this time around Elizabeth Barcohana, another LAGOP member and chair of CAGOP’s Jewish Community Engagement Subcommittee.
What caught my attention was not any single endorsement or voter guide, but the sequence of events and how closely it echoed the issues I had already been wrestling with: rules, discretion, and who gets to decide when party loyalty matters.
On March 5, 2026, the Israeli-American Civic Action Network (ICAN) announced a partnership with Barcohana under a headline that put her Republican Party position front and center: “CAGOP Jewish Engagement Chair Elizabeth Barcohana Partners with ICAN to Connect Republican Candidates with Pro-Israel Endorsement Process.”
ICAN said Barcohana would help connect Republican candidates at the local, state, and federal levels with its vetting process. The same announcement described ICAN as bipartisan and said its endorsement process was open across party lines.
Twenty-five days later, ICAN released its first round of California endorsements. The bipartisan slate included Republicans such as Steve Hilton, Gloria Romero, Michael Gates, and Rocky Rhodes, alongside Democrats including Antonio Villaraigosa, Brad Sherman, Brian Goldsmith, Rick Chavez Zbur, and Scott Houston.
ICAN said candidates had been evaluated according to its own issue-based criteria involving Israel, antisemitism, BDS, and related concerns. That distinction is important.
ICAN is not a Republican organization, and the fact that ICAN endorsed Democrats does not establish that Barcohana personally endorsed every Democrat on its slate. Her announced role was to connect Republican candidates with an outside organization’s endorsement process. That is not the same thing as personally choosing every candidate that organization ultimately supported.
But it raised a question that by then had become very familiar to me: what happens when the title and credibility of a Republican Party official are publicly attached to an endorsement operation that is explicitly bipartisan and ultimately supports Democrats as well as Republicans?
Beverly Hills City Council candidate Jonathan Mariande, a Republican, decided that question warranted a formal answer. He filed a complaint with Republican Party leadership arguing that Barcohana’s relationship with ICAN, together with her use of a CAGOP title, should be examined under the party’s own disciplinary rules.
CAGOP’s bylaws authorize the Committee or Executive Committee to remove, censure, or reprove certain delegates who publicly advocate against a Republican nominee or support a candidate of another party. The bylaws also establish a written complaint and investigative process for determining whether discipline is warranted.
Mariande’s interpretation was not self-proving simply because he filed a complaint. There were legitimate questions about whether helping Republican candidates access a bipartisan organization’s vetting process constituted personal support for Democrats that organization later endorsed.
The point was more basic. Once again, a Republican was saying: here is the conduct, here are the rules, now use the process and decide whether the rules apply.
I knew that argument because I had made it myself.
The dispute became more personal during Mariande’s own Beverly Hills City Council race. Barcohana published a voter guide recommending Democrat Sharona Nazarian and Republican Russell Stuart while telling voters to leave their third City Council choice blank.
Beverly Hills City Council elections are nonpartisan, but Nazarian is a known Democrat who had the support of the West Hollywood/Beverly Hills Democratic Club.
Mariande took his complaint public. In June, he posted an open letter saying he had forwarded the matter to Fox News host Trace Gallagher and argued that his experience reflected what he regarded as a larger problem inside California Republican politics.
Houston Brignano, the endorsed Republican congressional candidate in California’s 36th District, commented on Mariande’s post and suggested that he also send the material to journalist Elex Michaelson.
That seemingly small exchange became significant because of what happened next.
Barcohana subsequently published another voter guide for the November election. For California’s 36th Congressional District, in which Democrat incumbent Ted Lieu is running against Republican Houston Brignano, her guide did not recommend Brignano. Instead, it read simply: “NOT Ted Lieu.”
When someone asked Barcohana whether a Republican was actually running against Lieu, she responded publicly that there was a Republican in the race but that he had “failed my personal vetting standards.”
Given what had happened earlier, I found that explanation difficult to view in isolation. Brignano had publicly encouraged Mariande to send his complaint about Barcohana to another journalist.
Now Barcohana was acknowledging that Brignano was the Republican candidate while explaining that she had chosen not to recommend him because he failed her personal standards.
But that brought me directly back to the contradiction I had been wrestling with for months. If a Republican Party official can decide that party affiliation alone is insufficient and that a Republican candidate must first satisfy her personal standards, then loyalty is not absolute. Judgment exists. Discretion exists. Circumstances matter.
Once discretion is acknowledged, the institutional question becomes unavoidable: who gets to exercise it, under what circumstances, and why is one person’s exercise of personal judgment accepted while another’s can trigger accusations of disloyalty or demands for discipline?
Which brings us back to Mariande’s complaint. I was not prepared to declare that every allegation in it was correct. But the underlying request was familiar: reconcile the party’s conduct with its own written rules.
In his complaint, he warned that if those rules had no practical force when applying them became inconvenient, the bylaws risked becoming what he called “performative paper.”
By then, performative had become a word I used for a much larger problem. I saw it in people who created the appearance of political work through meetings, events, photographs, social media posts, titles, and proximity to power.
And I saw it in institutions that adopted bylaws, invoked principles, demanded loyalty, and spoke solemnly about standards, only to treat those rules as optional when enforcing them became inconvenient.
In one case, activity became performance. In the other, principle became performance. Both created the appearance of seriousness without requiring the substance of it.
When the Young Republicans Were the Adults in the Room
Back in July, the California Young Republicans’ own rules were tested, and they acted.
The Madera chapter endorsed a Democrat congressional candidate. The California Young Republicans said the endorsement violated their constitution and bylaws. They initiated a process, brought the matter before the organization, and voted to formally disband the chapter, effective immediately.
Their statement was unequivocal. The endorsement, they said, was a direct violation of their governing rules, and enforcing those rules was a matter of organizational integrity.
I am not arguing that every violation should result in disbandment, removal, or the harshest possible punishment. Different organizations have different rules, and different circumstances can justify different outcomes.
What mattered to me was that the Young Republicans understood the importance of organizational integrity.
They did not write a rule and then spend months explaining why this was not the right time to enforce it. They did not postpone the matter until after the next election. They did not point to someone else whose conduct might have been worse. They did not allow the process itself to disappear.
They examined the conduct, applied their rules, and made a decision. For all my criticism of Republican organizations, I have to hand it to them. In that moment, the California Young Republicans demonstrated the difference between having principles on paper and being willing to enforce them when doing so becomes uncomfortable.
That was the standard I had been asking for all along. And seeing that it could be done, especially by the youth, only made the contrast elsewhere harder to ignore.
We Do a Great Job of Driving Away the Good Ones
It was then that Tim O’Reilly’s line stopped sounding like an observation and started feeling like an explanation. I used to assume that people who walked away from political organizations were the people who cared the least.
But what I experienced changed my mind.
Sometimes the person who leaves is the person who cared enough to become exhausted. The person who reads the bylaws because they assume they were written for a reason. Who remembers the conversations because they believed the promises. Who saves the emails because details matter. Who asks what happened to the action everyone said would occur. Who notices when one case produces outrage while another suddenly requires nuance.
And the person who keeps asking about the difference long after everyone else has quietly decided that moving on would be easier.
Sooner or later, that person becomes inconvenient. An unresolved problem can sit quietly in a file. A person who keeps asking why it remains unresolved cannot. After a while, the persistence itself begins to create more discomfort than whatever produced the question in the first place.
That does not mean the persistent person is always right. God knows, I have been wrong. I have fought battles that mattered less than I believed they did. I have trusted people I probably should not have trusted and distrusted others too quickly. I pushed too hard at times and undoubtedly misunderstood motives along the way.
Politics is filled with imperfect judgments because it is filled with imperfect people, myself included.
Unfortunately, I came to realize that I cared more about fixing the apparatus than the apparatus cared about fixing itself. That was difficult to accept because I had joined the Republican party with the opposite assumption.
I believed that caring deeply about the institution would make me useful to it. I thought reading the rules, remembering promises, asking uncomfortable questions, and insisting that standards actually mean something were all part of the work of making the party better. By the end, I had begun to wonder whether those were the very things creating the friction.
And that, finally, was why Tim’s line made sense.
Sometimes the people who walk away are not the people who cared too little. They are the people who cared enough to keep asking questions long after everyone else had grown tired of answering them.
No More Years
At some point, you have to stop negotiating with reality. You cannot spend your life demanding that an institution become what you wish it were. You have to decide whether what it is deserves how much of your life you are giving it.
That is where I am now.
I am with the love of my life. I have three beautiful daughters. I have a business I spent years building before politics began consuming nights, weekends, and attention. And I still have things I want to create, things that can produce tangible value for the people I love and, hopefully, remain long after I am gone.
There was a time when another committee assignment sounded like an opportunity. Today, I see the hours attached to it.
Another campaign means another night away from home. Another internal dispute means another chain of emails, phone calls, meetings, evidence, and follow-up. Another convention means another weekend gone. Another political title becomes another obligation.
None of those things is inherently bad. They are simply no longer the highest and best use of my time.
I do not regret the time I spent in politics. Being inside the machinery taught me things about Los Angeles County, California, political institutions, loyalty, ambition, friendship, and human nature that I never could have learned from the outside. But appreciating what an experience gave you does not mean you are required to remain inside it forever.
I still believe people should participate in public life. Somebody has to run for school board, city council, water district, and all the other offices most people never think about until something goes wrong. Somebody has to read the agenda. Somebody has to ask what the contract costs. Somebody has to knock on the door, make the call, and talk to the neighbor who does not already agree.
Citizenship cannot consist posting on social media about what everybody else should be doing. If anything, my experience in politics strengthened that conviction. What it also taught me was to distinguish between a cause and the machinery that grows around it.
A party is an instrument. A committee is an instrument. A campaign is an instrument. A political title is an instrument. None of them is the principle itself. That distinction can become difficult to see from inside political life.
The institution gradually begins to feel indistinguishable from the cause it claims to represent. Criticism of the organization starts to sound like disloyalty to the principle. Walking away from the apparatus begins to feel like walking away from the fight. I don’t see it that way anymore.
I believed the party could be improved. I believed serious people doing serious work could change its culture. I believed infrastructure mattered more than performance, persuasion mattered more than outrage, constituencies mattered more than followers, and achievement mattered more than visibility. And I still believe every one of those things.
What has changed is where I intend to invest my time proving them.
I do not know whether I qualify as one of “the good ones” Tim O’Reilly used to talk about. That judgment belongs to other people. I only know that I showed up, I cared, I tried to build something, and I gave it a serious effort.
For me, that is enough.
Williams out.
