"Had no idea you were the sole website guy." Hard Lessons from MA's Yes on 4 Part 6
12.26.2025 email introduction
Dear supporter of psychedelics healing,
This is the introduction to Part 6 of my ongoing postmortem, intended to strengthen our movement. For those who read a partial, earlier draft of this section on Psychedelic State(s) of America, this version has more than twice as much content and has been much improved. The new and improved full Part 6 is attached to this email as a PDF and available on Substack as well.
This section touches on a lot of important issues with the campaign that weren’t individually large enough to be their own “parts,” but were important to share. The throughline is that the campaign seemed to suffer from a structure that discouraged accountability among strategic leaders.
Big problems detailed include:
An over two-million-dollar printing error—which to this day has not been satisfactorily explained to me—which required the campaign to overpay upfront and seemingly scramble for cash.
A multimillion-dollar shortfall in fundraising with the ballot committee only raising a little over $40,000 over the course of the first eight months of 2024—apart from a $60,000 four-month loan from New Approach. I still have no idea who was primarily responsible for fundraising.
A budget allocation that appeared out of alignment with strategic leadership’s ostensive strategy of prioritizing advertising. As a percentage of its budget, Yes on 4 spent less on both signature gathering and advertising than comparable campaigns (as can be seen in the table below), in addition to neglecting a field operation.
The neglect of outreach to the campaign’s preferred messengers as indicated by polling.
More minor but emblematic problems included:
A typo-ridden pre-packet having been sent out to the Clinical Advisory Board of the Massachusetts Hospital Association—it even contained 3 typos, including misspelling “association,” in just the first sentence (see highlighted below). Despite the document having the name of our de facto communications director/Dewey Square Group SVP of communications & strategy Jennifer Manley on it, the blame was placed on a junior Dewey Square Group consultant.
A $70,000+ website that our campaign director Jared Moffat purportedly still had to find time to personally, manually update amidst “14 hour days” (see text exchange below).
The multimillion-dollar campaign did not have a single, complete list of endorsers—and did not have endorsements up on the website—as of mid-October 2024, as reflected in the text exchange below:
A noteworthy development is, to my knowledge, not a single member of the campaign’s actual and nominal strategic leadership has wanted to publicly identify themselves as such since the campaign ended. Compare Moffat’s “Yes on 4 Campaign Director” email signature in September 2024 to how he characterized his role on LinkedIn in 2025:
For another example, while former grassroots campaign director Emily Oneschuk no longer has a LinkedIn, in a recent profile of her by a nonprofit, she doesn’t characterize herself as a former leader of the campaign:
Another major part of this section is the detailing of conflict-of-interest issues related to certain campaign officials. One of the conflicts most interesting to me is that posed by Moffat’s personal relationship with Stefanie Jones, one of the cofounders of the new nonprofit, Open Circle Alliance, that appeared to have been launched in collaboration with the ballot committee and New Approach, both of which utilized Moffat in a leadership capacity.
All this said, I want to be very clear that I welcome clarification from any and all interested parties and I am not infallible. I am committed to the truth and, while no one mentioned in this postmortem so far has reached out with a request for correction or to explain their behavior, I will always be ready to listen and promptly correct any claim found to be inaccurate.
All six of the currently available sections of the postmortem are available through the links below:
My goal remains to offer transparency to strengthen our shared mission.
Thank you for your continued support and commitment to this cause.
With gratitude,
Graham Moore
(Former Yes on 4 Staffer)