Aloha 

A fact of life that I have accepted a long time ago is that you have to have accept the things you cannot change, change the things you can, and pray for the wisdom to know the difference. That has been a guiding philosophy for me and where we have gone with The Kahua Group.  We set out a year ago to focus our time and effort on the races we could have an impact on and after watching the returns last night, I am happy with the results.  

Overall, last night was a good night for The Kahua Group.  Four new Republicans were elected to the State House (Bob McDermott, Richard Fale, Lauren Cheape and Beth Fukumoto) and we had the honor of being on all of their teams. With these additions we are now going to have four members of the Republican Caucus (Aaron Johanson, Richard Fale, Lauren Cheape and Beth Fukumoto) who are under 32 years old.  They will bring new energy, ideas and a new generation of leadership at a time that it is greatly needed.  We will also have Bob McDermott, an experienced legislator, leader and fellow Marine returning to the capitol.  All of them worked extremely hard and overcame great odds to win this year.  They deserve a huge round of congratulations for their efforts.  

In addition we had the pleasure of working on two successful County Council races on the Big Island and one successful Honolulu City Council race.  

There were other races that we worked hard on but came up short, that happens in elections and we have learned from those experiences.  We fought hard in the special election for the Honolulu City Council District 6, for two seats in the State Senate and three other State House races but did not come out on top.  I suspect the fight for those seats are not over and we look forward to what the future holds there.  

For our first year we produced a lot, we designed and managed 13 campaign website and social media programs, we managed production for 49 mailers which turned into over 700,000 pieces of mail, conducted polling all across the state, produced hundreds of banners and thousands of yard signs and sat through more campaign strategy meetings than we can remember.  More importantly, we made lots of new friends and had fun doing it.  

For those of you who want to pour over the precinct numbers, we have prepared the statewide breakdown.  You can download it here.  I will continue to look at it over the coming days and look forward to some spirited discussions and debates about what happened and why.

Mahalo to all of you who continue to work to make our state and country a better place to live.  Elections don't always go our way but if we are not in the fight they never will, so thanks for being in the fight.  

Take care,

Dylan Nonaka
The Kahua Group LLC
www.kahuagroup.com