Doug Pestana: Difference between revisions

'''Douglas Davila-Pestana''' was a co-founder and officer of the [[Synergy Opportunity Liberty Organization (SOLO USA)]] and Campaign Manager for [[Juan A Martinez]]'s 2013 race for North Las Vegas City Council. He was a Nevada presidential delegate for Ron Paul at the [[2012 Republican National Convention]], as well as a former officer of the [[Clark County Republican Party]] (2012 - 2013) and a member of the Nevada Republican Central Committee, where he was considered a leader in the party's libertarian wing. <ref name=":0">[[Nick Gausling]] is a source for '''some''' of the material written in this article and herein cites himself. Any such citations do not apply to the whole passage in which they appear, but only to certain facts within each passage. Furthermore, Gausling's citations of himself '''only''' apply on the initial versions of this article that he personally wrote. Future LPedia authors are welcome to contact him with any questions or clarifications.</ref> <ref name=":1">[https://esos.nv.gov/EntitySearch/OnlineEntitySearch Nevada SilverFlume Business Entity Search, Entity Number E0216072014-7]</ref>

Pestana is no longer active in formal politics. Professionally, he is a well-known data scientist and is currently building companies in the AI space. <ref name=":0" /> <ref name=":2">Conversations between Doug Pestana and Nick Gausling. [[Nick Gausling]] is a source for '''some''' of the material written in this article and herein cites himself. Any such citations do not apply to the whole passage in which they appear, but only to certain facts within each passage. Furthermore, Gausling's citations of himself '''only''' apply on the initial versions of this article that he personally wrote. Future LPedia authors are welcome to contact him with any questions or clarifications.</ref> <ref name=":3">[https://www.linkedin.com/in/douglaspestana/ Doug Pestana's LinkedIn]</ref> <ref name=":4">[https://www.remixinstitute.com/our-team/ Remix Institute]</ref>

Pestana was working as a marketing analytics manager in a Las Vegas-based bank around late 2011 when he started getting involved in local politics to support [[Ron Paul]]'s presidential campaign. He began engaging in the Central Committee of the [[Clark County Republican Party]]. He later caucused for Paul in the 2012 Nevada Republican caucuses and was elected as a delegate to the [[2012 Clark County Republican Convention]], then as a delegate to the [[2012 Nevada Republican Convention]]. At the state convention, Pestana first met [[Juan A Martinez]]. Pestana was also included on the Paul campaign's officially-endorsed delegate slate, and was elected delegate to the [[2012 Republican National Convention]]. <ref name=":3" /> <ref name=":2" /> <ref name=":0" /> <ref name=":5">Conversations between Juan Martinez and Nick Gausling. [[Nick Gausling]] is a source for '''some''' of the material written in this article and herein cites himself. Any such citations do not apply to the whole passage in which they appear, but only to certain facts within each passage. Furthermore, Gausling's citations of himself '''only''' apply on the initial versions of this article that he personally wrote. Future LPedia authors are welcome to contact him with any questions or clarifications.</ref>  

In the aftermath of the 2012 Clark County Republican Convention, in which the Paul-aligned libertarian wing swept control of the party, multiple party officers resigned from their roles. This left a vacancy in the role of Precinct Director (then called Precinct Coordinator), the elected officer position responsible for all of the party's grassroots field operations. Pestana was encouraged to run for the role by several of the party's libertarian board members, including [[Nick Gausling]]. Pestana ran for the position on a platform of using data to drive efficiency and decisions, and was elected with the overwhelming support of the libertarian-dominated Central Committee. He also served on the Nevada Republican Central Committee. <ref name=":0" /> <ref>See sources at [[Clark County Republican Party]]</ref>

Upon encouragement from a tenured Republican political consultant, Pestana led the party to engage in a ballot curing initiative to challenge the validity of voter registrations where the registered address conflicted with information obtained from the U.S. Postal Service's National Change of Address database. After significant manual labor from volunteers comparing addresses --- which was required under Nevada law for challenging the validity of a voter registration --- Pestana personally hand-delivered the documentation to the head of the Clark County Registrar of Voters. It is unknown if the Registrar's office ever acted on the information or invalidated any of the registrations, but an analysis by Pestana after the fact indicated that they likely had not. Pestana later joked that as soon as he left the building, 'the papers probably went directly into the trash.' <ref name=":2" /> <ref name=":0" />

Pestana also led the Clark County Republican Party's coordination efforts after the board voted to hire political consulting firm Silver Bullet to conduct voter ID and registration efforts in a few targeted state legislature districts with libertarian-aligned candidates in potentially-winnable races. Opponents of the measure claimed that the party should be doing that sort of work with volunteers rather than hiring consultants. Pestana and other board supporters of the initiative responded that the party's volunteer base, heavily-disorganized and mostly elderly, would not be able to accomplish the task which involved significant door-to-door canvassing over long hours in the Las Vegas heat. The most important race targeted in the initiative was that of libertarian Republican [[Kelly Hurst]], who in the primary had narrowly bested the non-libertarian front-runner by a mere 9 votes to eke out the nomination. While Hurst was defeated in the general election, he garnered more than 8,000 votes than had been cast in the entire primary, only losing to his Democrat opponent by about 6% in a race that was previously assumed to be non-competitive. The consulting effort was thus deemed a success by most of the party's board members. <ref>[https://www.nvsos.gov/SOSelectionPages/results/2012StateWidePrimary/Clark.aspx Unofficial Primary Election Results, Clark (2012)]</ref> <ref>[https://www.nvsos.gov/SOSelectionPages/results/2012StateWideGeneral/Clark.aspx Official General Election Results, Clark (2012)]</ref> <ref name=":2" /> <ref name=":0" />

Several months later, Pestana was named Campaign Manager for [[Juan A Martinez]]'s 2013 city council race. Though Martinez was ultimately not elected, Pestana's data background and methodologies were credited with helping to deliver significant efficiencies to the campaign, which went on to shape the direction of grassroots organizing in Nevada and other states in the years ahead. <ref name=":2" /> <ref name=":5" /> <ref name=":0" />  

Shortly after the city council race, Pestana concluded that the [[Republican Party]] was mostly an incompetent joke and stuck on obsolete methodologies like the traditional 'precinct program.' It was also excessively-difficult for him to mobilize the party's aging (and often libertarian-hostile) volunteer base into any kind of meaningful action different than what they had always known. Even the libertarian-aligned volunteers who had come into the party as a result of Ron Paul were difficult to organize efficiently, often wanting to do their own initiatives without following any kind of coordinated plan. Pestana therefore decided not run for re-election as Precinct Director of the Clark County Republican Party when his term expired in mid-2013. In the days leading up to the official expiration of his term, he lampooned the party by e-mailing the rest of the board and proclaiming that he was appointing every registered Republican voter in Clark County --- a sum numbering in the several hundred thousands --- as a 'precinct captain,' thus making him the most successful Precinct Director in party history according to the traditional precinct program metrics. Though obviously intended as farcical, the proclamation was ostensibly procedurally-valid, and there is no known evidence that it was ever reversed. <ref name=":2" /> <ref name=":0" />

Around the same time, in the summer of 2013, Pestana, Martinez, and several other Hispanic libertarians who had met as a result of Ron Paul's campaign --- many of whom also worked on Martinez's city council race --- decided to found the [[Synergy Opportunity Liberty Organization (SOLO USA)]] to take direct grassroots action into their own hands. While initially successful, the organization suffered a tremendous setback about one year later when Pestana moved out of state for work and Martinez took on a significant leadership role with [[The LIBRE Initiative]]. SOLO's operations essentially fizzled out shortly thereafter. <ref name=":1" /> <ref name=":2" /> <ref name=":5" /> <ref name=":0" />

Pestana canceled his voter registration with the Republican Party shortly before leaving Nevada, and has not been involved in formal party politics in the years since. <ref name=":2" /> <ref name=":0" />

Pestana has had a very successful professional life in the years since he left Nevada, working in data science, analytics, and AI across companies both large and small. He is presently the head of Remix Institute --- a data-focused service company that he co-founded --- as well as co-founder and CTO of Legalmente AI, which provides AI-powered contract review. He currently resides in Orlando, Florida. <ref name=":3" /> <ref name=":4" /> <ref name=":2" /> <ref name=":0" />