The Campaign Elevated a Divisive and Hostile Activist to Statewide Prominence Despite Forewarning - A Rising (and Fabricated) Hero, an Expensive Endorsement, and a Special Relationship

The list of problems with the Question 4 campaign is long, and this postmortem will examine the major issues in depth one by one.

Part 1 (released on October 17, 2025) analyzes the decision to run a policy out of touch with public opinion as indicated by polling, against the recommendations of the Massachusetts ACLU and Dewey Square Group strategists hired by the campaign.

Part 2, initially released in installments as Part 2.1, Part 2.2, and Part 2.3 (on October 21, October 31, and November 6, 2025), analyzes the campaign’s costly handling of a polarizing psychedelics activist and underground practitioner.

Part 3 (released on November 8, 2025), analyzes the campaign’s decision to divert resources to a new nonprofit, co-founded by a close associate of Yes on 4’s campaign director, while polling behind.

WHY THE CAMPAIGN FELL SHORT

2. The Campaign Elevated a Divisive and Hostile Activist to Statewide Prominence Despite Forewarning

2.2 A Rising (and Fabricated) Hero, an Expensive Endorsement, and a Special Relationship

A Rising (and Fabricated) Hero

After declining an interview request from The Boston Globe, New Approach provided the campaign’s first public response to James Davis’s misinformation in an exclusive interview with Talking Joints Memo journalist Jack Gorsline for an article published on February 8, 2024, two days after the Medford resolution criticizing the ballot question was passed. This interview, given months before Jamie Morey and I were hired by the ballot committee, was the start of a series of exclusives the campaign’s strategic leadership provided Gorsline.

While the campaign spokesperson told Gorsline that Davis was “making false claims” about the content of the ballot question and “suggested [Davis] may have acted in bad faith” to solicit money, the spokesperson still did not debunk Davis’s central falsehood that he had been wrongfully excluded from the drafting process.

Davis’s public profile appeared to be elevated substantially by his feigned victimization. Prior to October 2023, he had never been featured in The Boston Globe. Prior to January 2024, he had never been covered in Boston Magazine. Prior to October 2024, he had never been referenced in USA Today. And these are just a few illustrative examples.

There were other compelling grassroots advocates besides Davis, such as local police officer Sarko Gergerian, but what set Davis apart was his unmatched ferocity against the ballot question. Davis had fabricated a story that made him the central protagonist and was appealing to journalists: a principled, scrappy local activist leading the charge against the corrupt, out-of-state PAC that spurned the grassroots. Had the campaign exposed him early, he likely would have quickly become politically irrelevant, as he is now (to my knowledge, Davis has not been quoted by any Massachusetts or national news outlet since 2024, even with ongoing coverage of psychedelics legislation in Massachusetts).

And if the campaign had stopped Davis’s bad faith crusade from being a media focus, more conventionally appealing movement representatives, like police officers, doctors, veterans and mothers, could have been elevated as faces of the psychedelics grassroots instead.

Making the situation worse, the campaign was late and inconsistent in utilizing a sympathetic official spokesperson. Over and over again, the only individuals offering comment on behalf of the ballot committee were clearly hired guns: New Approach employees and a Dewey Square Group principal. This set up an unflattering contrast with Davis’s opposition, which repeatedly wove in the voices of local veterans and other compelling figures. Local veteran Emily Oneschuk started functioning as an official campaign spokesperson in December 2023 but did not offer comment consistently. For example, less than two weeks before election day, on October 21, 2024, a Dewey Square Group principal was the only campaign official quoted in a WBUR rundown, which characterized the ballot committee as “funded by the Washington, D.C.-based New Approach PAC,” echoing Davis’s opposition talking points (the only direct financial support from New Approach PAC was a $60,000 loan).

An Expensive Endorsement

Despite James Davis’s persistent opposition to, and dishonesty about, the ballot question, the campaign continued to court Davis as a partner with repeated overtures through at least the end of February 2024. These included reaching out “several times by email and text during the fall [in 2023],” a meeting between Emily Oneschuk and Davis at the end of 2023, in which Davis spooked Oneschuk enough to contribute to her brief resignation from the campaign, an outreach email on January 5, 2024, in which strategic leadership characterized Davis as an “important [leader]” whose involvement with the campaign was “critical,” a second meeting with Oneschuk after January 12, 2024, and a meeting with strategic leadership (two Dewey Square Group principals) on February 26, 2024.

Simultaneously, beginning as early as January 1, 2024, the ballot committee employed Dewey Square Group for lobbying to counter Davis’s influence in the legislature, ultimately spending $150,000 on lobbying, a relatively large amount. For comparison, Fortune 500 company Molina Healthcare, Inc. paid Dewey Square Group $96,000 for lobbying related to the state government program it operates.

Despite the ballot committee’s less than $10 million budget being dwarfed by annual revenues, ranging into the billions, of Dewey Square Group’s other clients, the ballot committee (Massachusetts for Mental Health Options) became Dewey Square Group’s second largest Massachusetts state-level lobbying client in 2024:

According to Dewey Square Group, the lobbying was related to Bay Staters for Natural Medicine’s push to get a competing proposal on the ballot. This characterization is supported by public disclosures showing Dewey Square Group was paid by the ballot committee to lobby exclusively regarding H.4255 (the ballot question legislation before it was sent to the ballot) with a “neutral” position.

As a reminder, ballot committees in Massachusetts are legally obligated “to expend money or other things of value solely for the purpose of favoring or opposing the adoption or rejection of a specific question or questions submitted to the voters.” Furthermore, under Massachusetts law, paid work encouraging lawmakers to endorse a measure before voters is not regulated as lobbying, but paid work encouraging lawmakers to adopt or reject a proposal to place an alternative measure on the ballot is.

Consequently, Davis’s effort to convince lawmakers to send an alternative measure to the ballot created a unique circumstance in which a ballot committee could, relatively easily, justify paying for regulated lobbying. The novelty of this situation was reflected in the fact no other Massachusetts ballot committee active in 2024 reported any lobbying spending.

The alternative psychedelics measure was notable for other reasons, too:

To summarize: the ballot committee determined it was appropriate to pay Dewey Square Group up to $150,000 for lobbying, more than Dewey Square Group was paid for lobbying by any other state-level lobbying client in Massachusetts that year save one, in response to a longshot, likely unconstitutional, legislative proposal championed by a former legislative staffer with a poor reputation and little influence among state lawmakers.

This contributed to the campaign expending, to my knowledge, far more resources on responding to Davis, and his relatively small psychedelics decriminalization/underground therapy organization (Bay Staters for Natural Medicine), than it did on influencing the public position of any other entity. As partially reflected in the above disclosures, in addition to the $35,000 donation and the $150,000 in lobbying, considerable staff and volunteer time was invested in courting Davis for eight months (July 2023 through February 2024) and then in efforts to contain him for another nine months (March 2024 through November 2024) until election day.

For example, encouraged by, and in collaboration with, the campaign, five months of my volunteer advocacy (October 2023 through February 2024) were focused, in significant part, on trying to bring Davis and the ballot committee together. My efforts included floating unity proposals, helping prepare strategic leadership for the February 2024 meeting with Davis, and acting as a go-between for the ballot committee and Davis. The ballot committee’s lead spokesperson even gave me “props” for having donated thousands of dollars to Bay Staters for Natural Medicine and told me there was “100% no reason you shouldn’t be supportive of [Bay Staters for Natural Medicine]” unless it went “nuclear […] in a really toxic way” as late as February 4, 2024.

By the time of the ballot question’s key legislative hearing on March 26, 2024, the ballot committee had spent over $700,000 excluding signature gathering costs, and, to my knowledge, had earned only a single public endorsement from a Massachusetts organization: the nominal endorsement of Davis-led Bay Staters for Natural Medicine.

By contrast, the opposition to the ballot question, having spent practically no money comparatively, had already gained support from two influential healthcare professional organizations: the Massachusetts Psychiatric Society and the Massachusetts Medical Society.

Despite the extensive effort to win him over, Davis criticized the measure he had nominally endorsed at the March 26 hearing, and, subsequently, Bay Staters for Natural Medicine officially rescinded its endorsement just a few weeks later. To my knowledge, this left the ballot question with no endorsements from local organizations out the gate. Almost certainly, the campaign’s decision to chase a partnership with Davis had significantly reduced its likelihood of success.

Personally, had I known of Davis’s deception at the same time as the ballot committee, I would not have spent the many hours of free time, and the over $3,000 in personal donations, that I did supporting Bay Staters for Natural Medicine as a volunteer from September 2023 through February 2024. I would not have been comfortable trying to win over someone who had appeared to operate in such bad faith toward the ballot committee as well as fellow grassroots advocates.

As it happened, I only learned the truth in late March 2024, when the campaign finally informed select grassroots advocates of Davis’s involvement in the drafting process.

Shortly after, the campaign made this information public by directly leaking internal communications (not using advocates like Jamie Morey and me as intermediaries) exclusively to local journalist Jack Gorsline for a Talking Joints Memo article published April 3, 2024. For the same article, the campaign provided Gorsline an exclusive reaction quote from lead spokesperson Oneschuk, who did not disclose the campaign’s responsibility for the leak and who implicitly kept the door open to “collaborating” with Davis.

One of Massachusetts’ most active grassroots advocates, in response to the leak, said Davis would have been “laughed out of the room” if the facts had been revealed earlier. As it was, Davis had spent more than half a year mobilizing opposition, and becoming the face of the psychedelics grassroots, on the basis of a largely unconfronted lie, undermining support for Question 4 in a way that was difficult to undo.

A Special Relationship

Rather than immediately using Jack Gorsline’s reporting as a springboard to broadly correct the record with journalists, the campaign chose to largely limit its pushback to giving exclusives to Gorsline, who had only a relatively small readership, even after James Davis’s organization began formally opposing the ballot question. Subsequently, Davis was consistently referenced as a credible opponent of the measure by major media outlets, like USA Today, The Boston Globe, and Boston.com, up to a week before election day.

The campaign’s shots at Davis via Gorsline included:

Other exclusives the campaign provided to Gorsline included:

As reflected in an email in which the ballot committee chair/campaign manager characterizes a summary of an off-the-record conversation between Gorsline and me as “super helpful,” a uniquely open line of communication to Gorsline was perceived as an asset. During the campaign, strategic leadership assisted, appreciated, and disseminated Gorsline’s journalism. Illustrating the point, on October 9, 2024, the ballot committee chair/campaign manager insisted on citing Gorsline’s reporting in an official campaign communication against my recommendation.

The resultingly high familiarity Gorsline had with the campaign meant he was uniquely aware of its shortcomings, which he commented on in a December 2024 op-ed and co-reported on in a three-part series for Lucid News in 2025: “Whistleblowers Claim 2024 MA Psychedelics Ballot Initiative Violated Campaign Finance Laws,” “Details of Alleged MA Initiative Campaign Finance Violations In New OCPF Complaints,” and “How (Not) To Win A Campaign: Lessons From Question 4.”