Guest:

Jay Donde, Co-Founder of the Briones Society

Guest Bio:

Jay Donde is an attorney for a leading enterprise software company headquartered in San Francisco, and was previously an associate at the law firm of Morrison & Foerster, LLP. He is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard Law School, and is a veteran of the Israel Defense Forces. He serves as the political affairs Vice Chair of the San Francisco Republican Party and as a delegate to the California Republican Party, and is Co-Founder and President of the Briones Society. His columns have been published in Bloomberg, City Journal, Wired, SFGate, and the Marina Times.

Show Summary

San Francisco is often portrayed as an electric-blue monolith—but underneath the surface lies a growing block of "closeted" conservative thinkers and independent voters who are deciding high-stakes local elections. In this episode of State of Gold, host Jon Slavet sits down with attorney and Briones Society Co-Founder Jay Donde to explore the changing ideological ground of California’s most famous progressive laboratory.

Donde dives straight into the "dirty little secrets" of San Francisco politics, mapping out how a modest block of 40,000 registered Republicans and tens of thousands of No Party Preference (NPP) independents have positioned themselves as a crucial swing constituency. Slavet and Donde evaluate Mayor Daniel Lurie's historic approval numbers and look ahead to the major fiscal battles he will face when standing up to the public sector unions.

The heat turns up as the team tackles the Billionaire Tax, breaking down why wealth taxes run completely counter to optimal tax theory by encouraging wealth migration. With startup founders and venture capitalists viewing the ballot measure as an "existential threat" that treats the state as a purely extractive mechanism, Donde details the looming threat of an innovation exodus. From calculating the technical math of a statewide Republican turnaround to a sensible framework for regulating artificial intelligence without fracturing the market into a patchwork quilt of fifty competing laws, this episode is an essential guide to restoring balance and sanity to California.

Chapters

00:00 – Preview: Deciding Swing Seats and Tech’s Breaking Point
00:20 – Co-Working Politics: Welcoming Jay Donde at Neon
00:48 – The Closet Conservatives: Unpacking San Francisco's NPP Voters
01:44 – Stigma or Survival? City Government as a GOP Recruiting Tool
02:44 – Mayor Daniel Lurie’s Approval Ratings
04:05 – Blighted Boundaries: Public Safety, Property Crime, and the Tenderloin
05:30 – Growing the Bloc: Pushing the City to the Center by 100 Votes
07:07 – Notching Wins: Rebuilding the Ground Infrastructure of the CA GOP
08:50 – The 400,000 Stat: Activating LA County's Unregistered Consensus
09:24 – Inverting Optimal Tax Theory: The Reality of Wealth Migration
10:04 – An Existential Event: How Founders View the Extractive State
11:53 – AI Policy: Why California Needs to Avoid the Legislative Gold Rush
14:09 – Patchwork Quilts vs. Federal Moratoriums on State AI Law
14:45 – Rapid Fire: Denuding Public Sector Unions and Politics as a Throttle

Connect with Jay Donde

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jay-donde/
Website: https://www.brionessociety.org/

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