Dr. Michael Martinez Scott had a $12,000 budget, no field team, no campaign manager, a knee injury that prevented him from door knocking, and two opponents who combined raised $250,000. On paper, this race was already decided but the results proved otherwise.
He ran for Riverside County Board of Education Trustee Area 1, a special district seat decided on California's June 2, 2026 primary ballot and won the Riverside County Board of Education Trustee Area 1 seat with 46.3% of the vote, putting more than 10,000 votes between himself and his nearest opponent.
Two things made that possible: a focused social media strategy and P2P texting.
Dr. Michael Martinez Scott is not a career politician. He is an educator with a Ph.D. in education administration and has spent his career as a superintendent, professor and education administrator across Southern California. Notably, he founded Irvine International Academy from scratch and turned it into a 2024 California Distinguished School.
Riverside County Board of Education Trustee Area 1 is a county-level seat with broader oversight authority than a local school board, covering curriculum standards, fiscal oversight and educational policy across the entire county. For a career educator who had lived the challenges of the system firsthand, it was the right race at the right time. His campaign message was straightforward: common sense over politics.
On June 2, Dr. Scott won the seat outright with 46.3% of the vote, the most of any candidate in the race. Oliver Unaka was eliminated.
The numbers were not in Dr. Scott's favor. According to Dr. Scott, one opponent raised $180,000, and the other raised $70,000 ($44,000 of which was her own money). Dr. Scott ran his campaign on a self-funded budget of just $12,000 from the very beginning.
And this was not his first race. In 2024, he ran for Western Municipal Water District Division 5, received 22.9% of the vote, and walked away with a lesson that would define his next run: showing up is not enough; you have to truly connect.
The financial gap was not the only hurdle. His main opponent had been campaigning for two years, held more than 30 endorsements and even had the incumbent cross party lines to support him. Dr. Scott was upfront with our team about the challenge.
"He had a website that was amazing and $180,000 to spend. If he just would have told me that, I probably never would have entered."
- Dr. Michael Martinez Scott
Then a knee injury took door-to-door canvassing off the table entirely. Dr. Scott had to rethink what success would look like and how to get there. Every message had to work harder than a knock on a door.
"I only did two things right in this election, and texting was one of them."
- Dr. Michael Martinez Scott
For most campaigns, P2P texting is one lane in a larger operation. For Dr. Scott, it was the strategy.
Working without a field team or campaign manager, he built his entire voter contact program around two things: discipline and precision. Rather than blasting a single message to every contact, he pulled lists directly from the voter file and segmented by political party, so every send reached an audience it was specifically written for.
Dr. Scott kept most messages under 160 characters to stay under one segment for the best cost control. On a limited budget, that kind of discipline was not optional.
Social media handled broad awareness. Texting handled direct, targeted persuasion. While both channels worked together to spread a unified message, neither channel tried to do the other's job, and that clarity made both more effective.
Mid-campaign, Oliver Unaka distributed a four-page colored mailer on May 20 describing himself as "Former Corona-Norco Unified School District Board President." A review of Corona-Norco USD election records shows no record of Unaka ever running for or serving on the board.
When Dr. Scott saw the mailer, he sprang into action. He segmented the voter file, identified the Democrats who had received it, and sent a text to roughly 33,000 voters overnight with a direct correction:
"Unaka lied on 5/20 mailer! He was NEVER President or ON the Corona-Norco Unified Sch Bd."
The replies came back immediately. Voters reacted, asked questions and got real answers in real time.
Real Text Message Examples
The correction landed before the false claim could take hold. No press cycle. No waiting. One targeted send to the right audience at the right moment.
This style of rapid response communication is a capability no printed piece, billboard or streaming ad can replicate.
Most campaigns measure texting success by volume sent. Smarter campaigns measure success by the first-party data that comes back.
Voter replies gave Dr. Scott real-time feedback on which messages were landing and how voters were connecting with the campaign. Some responses were substantive. Some were completely unexpected.
On the unexpected side, some voters organically referenced Scott's Tots, the Office episode that shares his name, which Dr. Scott was able to turn into real conversations. Others asked genuine, substantive questions about the role he was running for that warranted serious and timely responses.
Real Text Message Examples
The replies revealed which messages were landing, which topics resonated and where voters were paying attention.
"I was glad to see that my name even was generating some kind of response. I wouldn't have known that otherwise."
- Dr. Michael Martinez Scott
Dr. Scott only sent one MMS throughout the entire campaign, targeting members of CENRA, the Corona Eastvale Norco Republican Assembly. Sent mid-campaign, it reached 34,270 contacts with a 94% delivery rate and accounted for 62% of all replies generated across the eight individual texting projects he sent to voters.
The message included a candidate photo, credential highlights and an invitation to a community event, proving that supporting elements like images and videos drive deeper text engagement. That result is not unique to this race. It is a pattern we see consistently across campaigns.
Real Text Message Example
That is the real advantage of two-way texting - not just reaching voters but learning from them in real time.
He was outspent 19 to 1 by the combined field. He had no field team, no campaign manager and no ability to knock doors.
Despite these roadblocks, Dr. Scott won the seat outright with 46.3% of the vote, earning 32,668 votes and finishing 10,359 votes ahead of his closest opponent. To put that margin in context: in 2018, this same seat was decided by just 1.7 percentage points between the top two candidates. This time, with more money and more endorsements behind him, Unaka lost by 24 percentage points, demonstrating that a targeted, disciplined texting strategy can overcome even the most well-funded opposition.
On the RumbleUp platform side, the numbers speak for themselves. Across eight targeted sends, Dr. Scott reached nearly 200,000 contacts with a 94% average delivery rate, all while texting represented just 45% of his total $12,000 campaign budget.
Constraints sharpen strategy. When canvassing was not an option and funding was finite, Dr. Scott was forced to make texting work at a high level. The discipline that came from these constraints - precise segmentation, cost-controlled messaging and intentional targeting - is something campaigns of any size can apply regardless of budget.
Speed is a competitive advantage. The rapid-response moment in this race showed that P2P texting can function as a breaking news/PR crisis-response channel. However, this requires having your lists clean, your platform ready and your team trained before you need it.
Texting works best as part of a larger strategy. Dr. Scott paired texting with social media to take advantage of the unique strengths of each channel. Other campaigns pair it with mail, phone banking or door knocking. Know what texting is doing that your other channels cannot and let it do that job.
Visuals drive deeper engagement. A message that gives voters something to see, whether an image, a graphic or a video, consistently outperforms plain text when the content is strong. If you have a compelling story to tell, give it a visual.
Voter replies are intelligence, not noise. Even unexpected responses reveal how voters are connecting with a candidate's message and presence in real time. That kind of signal is simply not available through any broadcast channel.
Dr. Scott's results are a case study in what focused, disciplined P2P texting can accomplish when a campaign treats it as a core strategy rather than an afterthought.
Dr. Scott will take office as Riverside County Board of Education Trustee Area 1 Trustee. His opponents had more money, more endorsements and more time. What they did not have was a smarter and more active strategy.
"I was able to laser in my message for a group. That was the main thing that I really did like. And every time I did it, I always thought, why aren't my competitors using this?"
- Dr. Michael Martinez Scott