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Eric Taylor (U.S. House candidate, California)
Eric Taylor (independent) ran for election to the U.S. House to represent California's 14th Congressional District. He lost in the primary on March 3, 2020.
Taylor completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2020. Click here to read the survey answers.
Biography
Taylor obtained an undergradutate degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in January 2007 and a graduate degree from The New School for Social Research in January 2010.[1]
Taylor served in the U.S. Army from 2010 to 2017.[1]
Elections
2020
See also: California's 14th Congressional District election, 2020
General election
General election for U.S. House California District 14
Incumbent Jackie Speier defeated Ran Petel in the general election for U.S. House California District 14 on November 3, 2020.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ |  | Jackie Speier (D) | 79.3 | 278,300 |
 | Ran Petel (R)  | 20.7 | 72,705 | |
| Total votes: 351,005 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Nonpartisan primary election
Nonpartisan primary for U.S. House California District 14
Incumbent Jackie Speier and Ran Petel defeated Cristos Goodrow (Unofficially withdrew) and Eric Taylor in the primary for U.S. House California District 14 on March 3, 2020.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | Jackie Speier (D) | 77.3 | 158,158 |
| ✔ | | Ran Petel (R) | 15.9 | 32,447 |
| Cristos Goodrow (D) (Unofficially withdrew) | 3.8 | 7,843 | ||
 | Eric Taylor (Independent) | 3.0 | 6,081 | |
| Total votes: 204,529 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Campaign themes
2020
Ballotpedia survey responses
See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection
Eric Taylor completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2020. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by Taylor's responses. Candidates are asked three required questions for this survey, but they may answer additional optional questions as well.
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Currently, I work as a research manager in the space of virtual reality, and since 2011, I have been working as a public interest advocate after co-founding a non-profit called Occupy the SEC (OSEC). Through OSEC, I have been working on issues relating to financial market regulations. OSEC first gained recognition for writing a detailed 325-page comment letter on the Volcker Rule.
I served in the Army for seven years as an engineer officer. And, in 2008, I cut my teeth in politics as a researcher for Ralph Nader's presidential campaign.
My campaign has multiple goals, but my main objective is to advance an idea that I think can improve how our democracy works. Namely, I am running on the pledge that if I am elected, I will make my office's draft legislation "open source." I will leverage the same version control tools that software engineers use to manage open source projects (like Git) and empower anyone to collaborate on drafting legislation.
In other words, the main goal of my campaign is to empower anyone to participate in the process of making the rules we live by (which shape the world we live in).
On the issues, I support progressive causes and created a platform called Wonkhub as an experiment aimed at changing how people contribute to campaigns, starting with mine.
I studied Social Anthropology at UC Berkeley and completed my graduate education at The New School for Social Research.- If elected, I will make my office's draft legislation "open source" and empower more people to participate in the process of drafting legislation.
- We need to take action and iterate on solving problems faster to address growing problems, such as inequality and climate change.
- We need to uncap the size of Congress and invest energy into strengthening our democracy.
That said, I think we need to engender processes that empower more people to be able to press their insights into the public domain, and we need to create frameworks within our government that will enable better and faster iteration on policies. This is why I am pledging to make my office's draft legislation "open source."
There are many pressing problems facing America, in areas including (but not limited to) climate change, inequality, economic empowerment, education, immigration, retirement security, healthcare, corruption, and institutional decay. And, as I see it, many of these problems are compounded by the fact that they are related and co-evolving.
For instance, there is substantial evidence that climate change will make immigration and inequality worse. Inequality undercuts retirement savings. Low wage growth forces people to pursue more and more education and accumulate debt. Poverty is linked to food deserts and causes poor diets. Rising healthcare costs are pushing people into bankruptcy. Corruption gets normalized by political elites, and institutional decay hinders our ability to make progress on solving problems.
To solve the major problems facing our country (and the world), I think we need to change how we solve problems. We need to change how we mobilize around issues and iterate on policy solutions faster. This is one of the motivations for why I am pledging to make my office's draft legislative open source. That is, to solve big problems, we need to engage large populations in solving these problems. We need to incorporate the insights of diverse stakeholders and have nuanced discussions around the web of problems that we face.
The term "permanent campaign" refers to the state of affairs where politicians are constantly campaigning, and every political action is reduced to the twin goals of boosting public approval ratings and winning elections. In other words, the permanent campaign reduces politics to a game resembling capture the flag and subordinates the advancement of policies and legislation to the objective of winning elections.
That said, the central pledge of my campaign (to make my office's draft legislation open source) addresses the problems brought about by constant campaigning. Namely, making draft legislation open-source could align campaign work with legislative work and make the permanent campaign less disruptive with regards to the process of drafting legislation.
A better solution to checking the power and aligning the interests of career politicians with society would be to change our apportionment procedures by repealing The Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929. Namely, congressional districts should be smaller. If we had smaller districts then there would be more competition, more fresh perspectives, more ideation and output, more diversity, better constituent engagement, and we wouldn't have to force politicians out that are beloved by their constituents.
The size of congressional districts is much larger than what the Framers intended. The average size of a congressional district today is about 758,000 people (and growing). Whereas, the original text of the Constitution prescribed that we should have one representative for every 30,000 people! And yet, we have not added seats to the House of Representatives since 1911, and in 1929, Congress capped the number of seats in the House of Representatives at 435 via the Permanent Apportionment Act.
For comparison, America has the highest representation ratio of all the OECD nations. The country with the next highest representation ratio is Japan with one lawmaker for every 272,000 people. And many OECD nations have representation ratios of less than one lawmaker per 100,000 people.
Note: Ballotpedia reserves the right to edit Candidate Connection survey responses. Any edits made by Ballotpedia will be clearly marked with [brackets] for the public. If the candidate disagrees with an edit, he or she may request the full removal of the survey response from Ballotpedia.org. Ballotpedia does not edit or correct typographical errors unless the candidate's campaign requests it.
See also
2020 Elections
External links
Footnotes
