This e-mail was sent out from John Gotts owner of ConnectGOP to the Arizona Republican County and Legislative District leadership. Why would Arizona GOP Chairman Robert Graham try to take credit for ConnectGOP accomplishment?

Another interesting note, why would the AZ GOP Chairman want to control the message of the county and Legislative district Committees? John Gotts stated, “He also wanted to put massive controls on all counties, districts, precincts and candidates so that HE could craft YOUR message and control your data.” This top-down thinking had plagued the Republican Party since the beginning of the Neo-conservative era in order for the RNC to dictate what Republicans should think! This e-mail sent to the AZ GOP leadership and the promoting of HB2305 (Top-Two revisited) by Chairman Robert Graham seem to point out that the establishment is working hard to control the growing swell of independent thinking grassroots patriots that no longer what to be told what to think or what to post on their own district ir county websites. Do you need to be told what to think?

Subject: ConnectGOP vs. Robert Graham…

Howdy to the Arizona Republican Counties and Legislative Districts!

We are excited with all of the positive feedback from the websites and social media training. I wanted to take a moment to thank you all. Because of the feedback and ideas from you and hundreds of house and senate Republicans from across the nation we continue to build the best legislative tool in America.

Some questions recently came up regarding our working with the State Party. It is true that we stopped working with them a couple of weeks back. I am not much for drama but it seems that from questions we are being asked there is some confusion as to what happened. In a nutshell we didn’t feel comfortable with Robert Graham divulging trade secrets about our products, software and services to his classmates at the Thunderbird Business school without our consent when he made our company his class project (his words). He also wanted to put massive controls on all counties, districts, precincts and candidates so that HE could craft YOUR message and control your data. I heard that Robert also flew to New Mexico where it’s my understanding that he claimed these ideas as his own and that HE would be bringing these to New Mexico, which by-the-way is not correct as their Chairman was already providing this to his state and we’ve been working with more than a dozen senators and house reps in NM who brought us to the Chairman in NM after years of working with us successfully. Robert called me from Denver telling me that he’d showed my business model and product/service offerings to Karl Rove’s team, adding that I shouldn’t worry because he didn’t give them my name or company name and that perhaps they would invest in ConnectGOP, which I NEVER authorized him to do. That would ONLY make sense to me if he was pawning it off as his own. If not why wouldn’t he have put me in touch with them. Again, I have phone records of all of this and witnesses in New Mexico.

We also felt very uncomfortable with the direction he wanted to take the website. After he asked for a new template that would look like a financial website he liked, and we built that template, he provided no feedback for a month while he finished school and meanwhile all of you waited patiently for us to deliver what John Strasser said we would. When John sent out an email originally letting you all know we were available in Arizona he was IMMEDIATELY fired by Robert, who wanted to control a roll-out that frankly had nothing to do with him. When we finally had that new template available he canceled that and our work and had us start building a clone of the Mormon.org website’s Why I’m a Mormon video page (he’s changing this to Why I’m a Republican) and I have the screenshots and email he and his team sent.

We finally decided that with every single day counting and elections being won by less than one hundred votes many times, we could not wait any longer on getting you all trained and going and we released the sites to you to do with what you would like. Robert told me repeatedly that he wanted to control how each of your sites would look and so when we sent out an email saying that we were moving forward after a nearly two-month wait and that you could all get started he became very upset. I let him know that we would no longer working with him and that the counties, districts and candidates are not his children to command, nor did he bring ConnectGOP to any of you. Shane Wikfors used our services, for two years before Graham was elected, at the AZGOP. We called you all ourselves and it was John Strasser who introduced us through the email that got him fired. John Strasser is a solid conservative whose only transgression was bringing you the best product in the country. Robert fired him for this and there is a voice recording by Strasser less than twenty-four hours after I initiated delivery to all of you.

We’ve built this business one candidate at a time and through their feedback we’ve built an absolutely amazing product, which NOBODY outside of our membership has ever seen. District Judge Cecil Ash, who I’ve copied on this email to all of you, described us as an upside down funnel where those inside shared ideas and those outside the funnel had to work against the brain-trust that resided inside that funnel. That sums it up very well and since Cecil told me this two years ago the numbers and ideas inside that funnel have grown tremendously. This is why we RARELY lose elections. We provide a demonstrable advantage to anyone who has worked with us because we share ONLY with Republicans in our membership with over one thousand years of combined winning strategies, which we then share with the group. We worked with Shane Wikfors for more than a year when he was communication director for the Party and he used it many times daily to get out the GOP message in Arizona. I’ve also copied him on this email. Senator Kelli Ward uses us daily and did during and after her successful campaign for AZ State Senate.

I believe in choice. I believe that each county is autonomous to do what they want. In Robert’s conversations with me, he and his staff disagreed, saying that the counties and districts should NOT be able to control their messaging, and he wanted a video of himself and feeds from the Party to dominate YOUR website. We do not believe that counties, districts, precincts or candidates should be “controlled” by the State Party.

We shared trade secrets that my seventy-year-old father and I have built with nearly forty thousand personal man-hours of work so that you could have the best software-as-a-service on the planet. As a result of our efforts legislators in twenty-two states have won nearly 100% of their election in 2010, 2011 and 2012. Prior to this we created one of the first pop-up and anti-spam products in the world and brought in millions of dollars, so this isn’t our first success.

You all have a choice as you move forward through the use of the websites and social media control panel and the services that we offer and that many of you like Maricopa County are now using. Let this email serve as a statement that NONE OF YOU SHALL EVER PAY A DIME FOR OUR SERVICES, and that YOU and ONLY YOU CONTROL YOUR DATA and Website, with FAR MORE controls than what you are being offered by Graham. This is and has always been our in-kind donation to the entire state for up to five thousand copies per state for Republican groups in the state. That is a commitment of up to $5,000,000 total to serve every county, district, precinct or Republican group in the state in perpetuity. There is no setup or ongoing fee EVER. I understand that Robert is now mimicking our business plan too and expects to charge only candidates AND host everything on the State Party’s domain. Since WHEN is the State Party or its chair supposed to profit from their position?

It is a sad day to have to write this email. I have months of texts, emails and phone conversations that show that I was pumped for information, that this information was shared without my permission and now ultimately I understand that Chairman Robert Graham is going to compete with my father, me and my wife Bethany and the company that we built by Republicans FOR Republicans over four years of me driving from state-to-state asking what people needed so we could build it. It appears Robert is jump-starting his dream off of our sweat, hard work and attention to detail. I consider this unethical behavior.

For any of you that would like references please just let me know and I will supply them. Please call Cecil Ash, Kelli Ward, John Strasser or Shane Witfors. They will all tell you that we are honest, hard-working Christians who care only about providing you with a better product and service than anyone in the market and at a better price. AGAIN, this costs ONLY candidates and it is $100/website, $100/social setup and $180 for a 180-minute training session (six half-hour online lessons) to train those candidates to win and to raise more donations, faster than ever before. There is a small fee for service, upgrades and support but again, this is ONLY for candidates.

I have heard Robert is telling people that I’m a Democrat, that I’m friends with Harper Reed (the Obama CTO whom I took a picture with at a tech conference in Sun Valley, Idaho) but you can judge for yourself based on my work the last four and a half years or the attached video, which was recorded just after that tech conference.

As the interviewer said:

“John Gotts, CEO of ConnectGOP, has something interesting cooking with a social media system that hooks together Republicans. Generally I don`t get involved with politics, especially Republican ones, but I`ve been tracking Gotts for years.

I share this to scare the Democrats into building a system that keeps data around between campaigns. Gotts` does. Also, they should build a system that shares data between all Democrats. Gotts` does (for Republicans only).

John Gotts might be the most dangerous guy the Democrats have ever met. Worse of all he doesn’t share the dogma of many other Republicans and is mostly focused on helping Republicans win. If that doesn’t scare Democrats, nothing will. They should study him and fear him. If the Democrats don`t, the Republicans are the tech leaders by default.” – Robert Scoble (one of the world’s biggest tech bloggers – as in he sees everything out there before most even know it exists)

Amen and amen. I am on this earth to help Republicans win their elections. I am a Christian. I am a Republican to the bone. I am pro-life. I have dedicated every waking hour for nearly half a decade to provide you all with a product that has allowed nearly 100% of our members to win their elections across the nation in back-to-back elections. I do all of this because I love my country.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

In the meantime I will continue to service, AT NO CHARGE EVER, all of the counties and districts who signed up and started their training. I am going to help you raise more money than ever before and to get more winning campaigns than ever before. And yes, we will bring in enough money from the sales to candidates to keep the doors open, the servers secure and to provide the most excellent service and winning strategies to which our members have become accustomed over the last four+ years.

If you would prefer a product that has yet to be tested by ANYONE, which in my opinion attempts to control your messaging and your autonomy and which does perhaps 5% of what our product does and even then not as well, then Robert’s new untested software is for you. The idea of hosting on the main domain site, btw, was John Strasser’s idea and is brilliant. I noticed in Eric Morgan’s email today that he claims the Party will be doing this for you too. Funny they’d take John’s idea and yet fire him. It seems they did the same with me.

By all means look at what they have and consider this:

• Their product has never been tested by a single user.
• Their product copies about five percent of what ours does and badly.
• Our product has been used successfully for four years and has helped nearly two hundred House/Senate members win nearly 100% of their races in 2010, 2011 and 2012.
• Our product comes with a brain-trust of information gathered from our winning candidates telling us their best techniques for winning races and raising donations fast.
• Our product is proprietary software, not some WordPress template that sends to Twitter and Facebook only.
• Our social media suite literally allows you to watch video, listen to audio, view pictures, documents, text, like, unlike, direct message, @reply, share, retweet, resend, post over 140 characters to Twitter & LinkedIn with a link back to your site to read the rest… (too much more to even mention on social)
• Our product allows you to send to ALL of the top ten blogs with a button click from the Web, email or text.
• Our product allows a county or district to send out across ALL districts and precincts with a single button click (opt-in).
• Our product comes with 24/7 service and support where we get back to you within sixty seconds.
• Our product continually is being upgraded by hundreds of members across the country who not only add best techniques but direct us in what to build.
• … I could go on for an hour. There is simply nothing like our product on the market, just as Robert Scoble pointed out in his interview.

Eric Morgan told the LDs and Counties today that the State Party is now in business to provide:

• Full Republican website out of the box (NOT EVEN CLOSE to what we offer)
• Ability to add and customize pages as seen fit (As seen fit by Robert Graham by his own words to me)
• Gallery pages for elected officials and district/county leadership (this was entirely our idea and it’s sad that they took that one)
• Blog posting with ability to post to facebook/twitter (We do all of this and more for Facebook personal pages/fan page & groups, Twitter (all aspects), Pinterest, Blogspot, WordPress, Tumblr, LinkedIn, SoundClound, InstaGram, Google+ and more are added each quarter with full functionality so you don’t ever have to visit the site, including deleting everywhere with a button click or a single click to share videos, news stories and email newsletters)
• Feed widgets to display facebook/twitter status (Ours has a far more powerful control panel that only Hootsuite comes close to matching and they charge a lot for commercial sites)
• Google calendar integration (Anyone can add a Google calendar, this is not their invention and of course we offer that)
• Contact and get involved form pages with ability to store and access user data (we’ve always prided ourselves on this part and the fact that once these are added to your address book they are searchable, shareable and you can immediately send to those groups by email, text and social media, including FROM email, text or the website. I am not aware of ANY company that does what we do in this space and we are making even bigger improvements to this the next six weeks)
• Blog rolls to display district blog/new and state party blog/news (We already do this on the updates pages but we don’t make it prominent on your site unless you choose that.)
• Access/display upcoming “I am Republican” video series professionally produced by the AZGOP (this is something Robert copied from Mormon.org‘s website and will be tough to manage if it gets any traction, IF people are willing to upload why they are happy via video. Robert’s own video will be prominent on all pages from what he originally requested from us and I have those mockups still emailed from his group.)
• Hosting on AZGOP hosting accounts with URLs (this was absolutely John Strasser’s idea and it’s a shame he was fired for trying to get this out to all of you.)
• Facebook/Twiiter “share” integration on every page/post/video so visitors can help promote your site. (We allow visitors to share across ALL of the top and smaller social sites in the country, this idea is as old as social media itself and not at all original.)

What’s left to complete in Eric Morgan’s own words today:

• Bug on the caption display of the gallery pages – line breaks don’t show so all contact info is formated incorrectly. Was hoping it would be resolved today but we will deploy without contact info below gallery picture. Clicking on picture will take user to the contact page for that person.
• Get Involved/About PC copy. Non-gating as districts/county can add this themselves or add when I complete copy.
• Logo tag line doesn’t yet display a custom line – i.e district or county name
• Table of Contents page for “People” and “Issues” pages is almost done. (This was lifted from Democrats.org at my suggestion to Robert)
• Documentation and training material needs to be written down
• Deployment plan needs to be documented. Will do this while deploying the first site.

And that last line is the real point here. IT HAS NEVER BEEN DEPLOYED ANYWHERE, EVER. They kept us from delivering ConnectGOP to you for months while they pumped us for our ideas and now they are scrambling to build something quick and get it out there to compete with a product that has been in Arizona for two years BEFORE Robert Graham got here.

So you have to ask yourself WHY? Is your State Party using its time and money wisely to go into business at all? Is that what State Parties are supposed to spend your money on, competing with Republican businesses that already have far more than what they “hope” to get out early this week? Is it correct that the State Party is competing with ANY business? Is that okay with you when another business has already been doing a great job for years in your state and everyone who uses it loves and wins? Does it seem right to you that the State Party is now attempting to put out a new product that has never been tested? Is this really the best use of their time and money? Is this why you hired Robert Graham?
We will continue to do what I consider God’s work in saving our great nation from the hands of the liberals.

Best regards,

John Gotts
Founder
ConnectGOP

Please enjoy the video below, which I referenced in this letter:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=08-kX4SI4BA