March 11 Launch Videos

Hello people of the New California First District.

I’m Richard Minner and I’m running as a non-partisan to represent you – all of you – in Congress.

This launch video introduces my campaign and I posted four short videos explaining further.

The first is about me and why I am running.

The second is how I intend to serve in Congress and introduces a key component, which is a constituent advisory council that would draw from the full range of political views throughout the district.

The third is about the campaign itself, and in particular that I’m not raising any money.

The fourth is about AB604, and Prop 50, and the redistricting, which I believe created an opening for a nonpartisan such as myself.

Full details are on my site, richardminner.com, including ways to get involved.

In March, we’ll be building out the site, spreading the word, recruiting volunteers and opening applications for a pilot version of the Advisory Council.

In April, I’ll be traveling throughout the district to various events, and you can request on the site for me to come visit your town or organization.

I ask you to share this campaign widely – once I have gained your confidence that it’s worth doing so.

Thank you for your time.

Hello again. I’d like to tell you a little about myself.

Firstly, I am a non-partisan. I’ve been a no party preference voter for over 40 years.

This puts me in the largest party affiliation group in the country at about 40%. There’s about 40% of us who are not affiliated with either of the major parties or the minor parties.

Interestingly, despite that, out of 435 members in the house, there’s only one, as of a few days ago, who is not affiliated with one of the two major parties. Well, the system is structured that way, and I’ll elaborate on that later in the campaign, but if things were a little different, you might expect to have a few more – any – nonpartisan voices in Congress, and I think it could improve things.

That was my main motivation for running because I’ve seen the partisan divide get wider and wider and worse and worse over the last decades.

There are still plenty of people on either side who are quite convinced that the greater danger facing the country is the other party and that they must be stopped at all costs. I think the partisan divide itself is the bigger problem. So that’s what I’m aiming to bridge and try to calm, and I bring that sensibility and that voice to Congress.

Professionally, I am a software architect and engineer, so I have those sensibilities.

An engineering sensibility is basically wanting it to work. That’s what engineers care about. They want it to work. They don’t care so much about what solution and is it their solution and who gets the credit. That’s secondary if it matters at all.

Engineers also care about cost. That’s a fundamental. It was Wellington in the 1800s paraphrased saying that engineering is doing for one dollar what any damn fool can do for two. Because in the end, cost really does matter. You can’t have everything, and if you do this, you can’t do that and so on.

Budgets exist in the real world. In government there’s a certain lack of that, and this is one of the problems that they don’t want to address because everybody wants something, and it just piles on. At some point, you have to take costs seriously. So engineering sensibility brings that.

The architect sensibility is about how all the pieces come together to form a coherent whole. And if you don’t have a good architecture, you may have good parts, but the whole is not going to be very good. And that’s something I’ve been doing now for a couple decades and very successfully.

Architecture also unavoidably involves multiple stakeholders who have different ideas and biases and goals and priorities, and so you have to work with a lot of different people and sort things out. So I have a lot of experience in that area as well.

Lastly, but not least, I am good at math. I’m a math guy. You can read about that on my site, and that’s important because a lot of government activities and laws are unavoidably mathematical.

There’s aspects where the math is fundamental and there’s a lot of trickery. And I, for one, am not easily fooled when it comes to mathematical trickery. So I think that’s a strength. I hope you’ll appreciate that.

What I bring to the game here in terms of mindset and temperament is something that our district and the country could use and that you’ll support me in part because of that.

Please share this campaign as I asked you before. I hope I’m gaining some confidence on your part, and I thank you again for your time.

Hello.

Let me tell you a little bit about how I envision serving our district in Congress.

My main theme is it should be about communication between the district and Congress, representing the district – the whole district.

In order to do this, what I plan to do is to form a [district] advisory council.

Between 20 and 30 people selected (somewhat self-selected) through application and nomination, (there are details of the process on the site) that represent a wide range, pretty much from far to far and off to the side, various groups within the district coming together regularly to meet in civil, but in-depth discussion about the issues facing the district and the country.

My role would be to act as the go between, between Congress and this council.

The Council will bridge the divides within the district and I act as a bridge between the council and the district and Congress.

I believe representative government should be about communicating in both directions, demystifying what’s going on in Washington so that people can understand how things are happening there and why.

I don’t come to the job with a full set of answers because, again, I have an engineering sensibility, and that’s not how you solve problems, by having preconceived solutions to things.

You have to be ready to learn. There are you probably many things you don’t know when you approach a problem. You have some biases and some some ideas, but if you’re not open to understanding the trade-offs, and why people feel one way or another, it’s just headbutting and deadlock.

So, that’s what the idea of this council would be, is to listen to each other. I’ve no illusion that this group of 20, 30 disparate people is going to come to an agreement on many things, they probably won’t agree on much at all, but they will learn to understand why they disagree, and hopefully discover that the people that they disagree with aren’t evil.

Most people are pretty decent. There’re some bad apples out there, but it’s really a pretty small percentage – as they say, only one bad apple. And unfortunately we see a lot of that. And so the people have the impression that there’s just a lot of horrible people. That’s not my experience at all.

So the council is a critical part.

I am going to be forming a pilot version even during the primary. I hope to get, get eight to 10 people together, throughout the district and have at least one meeting in mid-April to late April, and maybe another meeting in May. And then try this out and then see how it plays. And then those people can reach out to their various constituencies within the district.

The the other thing I bring, in terms of how I’m serving, is: There’s a strength in being a non-partisan, which can be put very simply as I will not be whipped.

This to me is the saddest thing in Congress today. When you grow up hearing about the minority whip and the majority whip, you just sort of take it in stride. But if you stop to think about it, it’s pretty sad.

Their job is what they call party discipline, which is a polite way of saying: threatening and bribing people to vote the party line instead of their conscience. It’s really that simple.

There are plenty of representatives who would like to break with their party more than they do, but they can’t afford it. It’s too dangerous. They’re gonna get in trouble.

This is also driven by the fact that most members of Congress want to get reelected over and over. There are a lot of career politicians in Washington, in case you haven’t noticed.

That’s the other thing I bring. I’m not a career politician. I will not run for reelection. I think Congress is better served by representatives who are acting as a kind of sanity check on what’s going on.

I think the experience argument that you need people who understand the workings of Washington and years of experience for that. Well, my question for that is, how’s that working?

I’m not convinced that that’s the overwhelming argument. I think we may be better off almost closer to a jury system where, why do we have a jury system?

Well, because we’re worried about if you have an entrenched group making all the decisions, the important ones, you can have a risk of corruption. Judges do fine for many things. Plenty of cases are settled by a judge, but when it’s really important, somebody’s life is on the line. They have a right to a jury trial, which is interesting.

And so the turnover with fresh eyes and fresh voices, I think, is a good thing. And I would, instead of running again, I would spend part of the time of the two years cultivating and mentoring someone else (someone “elses”) to run the next time. I think that’s probably a better system. In any event, I don’t want to run for more than two years.

So that’s basically what I would bring to Congress in order to be able to represent the full district, is bring those voices together and take that to Congress, and bring back from Congress what’s going on there and try to explain it to everyone.

Thank you.

Hello again.

I’d like to tell you a little bit about how I’m structuring this campaign.

The key feature, which may seem a little odd, is I’m not raising any campaign funds. Let me explain a little bit why. In short, it’s 2026 and I really believe given the kinds of connectivity we have now with websites and social media and these videos, that campaign spending is suspect.

In my mind, the typical view, the standard view, is that you need a party to back you and do all the party stuff, and you need to spend two to three million dollars, or in a tight raise twice that. And what’s it for? Well, the money is primarily for ads and consultants and yard signs and things like that. Yard signs aren’t that cheap. I mean you can get them moderately cheap, but the reality to me is expenses can and should be very low.

And so far, I’m not asking for any money. I’m asking you, please send $0. Because there’s a filing fee; my website is $20 a month; I’m hosting videos on Vimeo, $12; So it’s a little here and a little there.

I expect to spend actually under the $5,000 limit that requires an FEC filing. So I probably don’t even have to file for the FEC, for the federal, although I may anyway.

So far I do have my first collateral, it’s a very nice business card, which basically has this nice slogan: Let’s be the first district to put people before parties. I think that’s pretty good. And it’s got the contact on the back with the QR code and the website, phone number. And this is where people can connect.

So I’ll be traveling throughout the district, sending cards around, meeting with people. I’ll probably make a little more collateral. A thousand business cards is twenty dollars. Okay. So not a big expense.

Ads in my experience are not necessarily horrible. There are some very lovely ads, but most ads, 95%, to me are about trickery and fear. And I just, I can’t do it. I’m allergic to that.

In 2024, looking it up, the total campaign spending in the United States for federal and state races was twenty billion dollars. Approximately, give or take a few billion. Now that’s not a big percentage of our GDP, we’re a very big country, but it’s twenty billion dollars. And I just don’t feel right with that. It just doesn’t seem right.

So I’m hoping there’s enough other people who feel that way. And if you get on board with what I’m doing and you support me and I can give you cards, you can just share on the various social media. I think this can work, and we’ll find out.

April is going to be the big month. I’ll be getting out and meeting people personally. I also believe, rather than short soundbite type slogans and messages, is to have conversations with people. And I think I can bring a lot of people around. I’ve had a lot of conversations with people across the political spectrum and they usually connect, because I’m genuinely interested in why they feel the way they do, and I want to understand the differences.

So, I feel if I can do that, if I can win someone over in a five or 10 minute conversation, they can spread the word. So, that’s what I’m going to do. That’s the nature of my campaign: direct connection to as many people as I can, small groups and one-on-one, and hope that they, you, will share the campaign.

Thank you for your time.

Hello again.

This is the last of the four initial videos and to me, kind of the fun one to talk about what happened, how did we get this situation? Why am I in District 1 in Santa Rosa?

To be brief, the original district one was this whole upper corner with these three counties and all these counties, and it was solidly Republican. Still is, and there’s a special election because Mr. LaMalfa died. And Gallagher has every expectation to win. I think Mr. Gallagher should win.

So the people in this area, the majority of them have had a representative more in line with their thinking for the most part. Now, Prop 50 was to enable the Democrats to get five seats to counter what happened in Texas and so on and so on. I’m not going to get into that right now. That’s a very complicated situation.

But you know, we already had relatively few Republican seats, nine out of 52, and now they’re hoping to take that down to four.

So in order to do that, they had to divvy up some of the Republican areas. So what we have now is this part of the old District 1 was joined with this more Democrat-leaning area, including Santa Rosa. That’s why I’m in District 1. I used to be in District 4, a solid Democrat district.

So the issue is, it’s only leaning now. It’s like D+10. So it’s a 56-44 kind of split. So the way I see it is the people who used to, you know, the 40% or more in this district who are Republican or leaning that way, might be a little unhappy with being forced to have a Democrat representative.

The Democrats, you know, they’ve been in Democrat districts already. So for them it’s just business as usual.

The opportunity is, if I can persuade the Republican element here, and I’ll be talking to the Republican candidates, that the chances of winning the district are very, very low. Okay? The only way they can do it realistically would be to get the top two spots by splitting the 40ish percent. So each getting 20%, 22% and then somehow hoping that no single Democrat gets more than that. Okay?

Because the simple reality is if when we get to the general election, it’s a Democrat and a Republican, the Democrat wins. There’s just no other way it can be. Okay. The Democrat would have to be horrible, or the Republican would have to be magically good, is the only way that that can happen.

So if I can make that case successfully, it seems to me I should be able to get strong support in the primary from the Republican-leaning part of the district. And if I could even get 34%. Guaranteed one of the two top spots. Can’t be third with 34%. So, that’s why it seems plausible to me.

Now, of course, to win in the general election, I have to be able to persuade at least a few people in the middle that I’m a decent guy. That I’m not just a stealth Republican “right wing” guy. I think I can do that, because I’m not.

And so that’s the basic strategy here, to try to get first or second spot in the primary, by appealing to the people that have been essentially disenfranchised by Prop 50. And I expect they’re not going to be real happy about it. So I’ll talk to them. I’ve talked to a few, but that to me is a very realistic strategy.

So if I can do that, get the second spot, then the general election campaign will be quite interesting because it will be a nonpartisan against a Democrat, almost certainly. And I’ll be able to ask some difficult questions like, how are you going to not toe the Democratic Party line, what will you do to represent almost half of the district?

I can answer those questions. I’ll be interested to see what some of the Democrats have to say.

So anyway, that’s what happened to the district. That’s what I think can happen with the race. And I hope you agree and I hope you’ll share my campaign.

Thanks again for your time.