Ask America is built on the infrastructure of the Digital Democracy Project. Williams is partnering with the organization, meeting monthly on new bills that come up for consideration. Interships are being set up so his students can help work on the coding and improve its functionality. The Digital Democracy Project involves so many areas that Full Sail offers degrees in, he said, the synergy was natural.

But the key piece here is that Williams has pledged to honor the majority decision and vote in Congress the way District 11 constituents vote — no matter the outcome. He says he will not be swayed by House Democratic Caucus deal-making, nor be beholden to lobbyists or special interests.

“ I started coming up with the idea of direct democracy because I love the idea of people being able to vote on topics and have a direct line of communication to the representatives,” Williams said. “We're always gonna vote with the majority. It might not be what I personally believe, but if that is what the majority says, then how does one person's opinion trump everyone else? It shouldn't. And so that's why even if it's not what I want, I would still go along with it. And if it's directly opposite to what I want, then honestly I think it comes back on me for not maybe explaining it well enough or maybe trying a different way to explain it or something like that.”

That's the teacher in Williams coming out. Which brings us to another point: Williams is not at all interested in using Ask America to drive a career change. He wants to launch Ask America, then return to his classroom.

“I don’t want to be a career politician," he said. That means he supports term limits. For himself, he's thinking one to two terms — that's four years in Congress — max.

“My ultimate goal is to go back to teaching,” he said.

Williams acknowledges that Ask America is a “weird, hard sell.” But he believes the idea may sway independents and perhaps some GOP voters too.

“I know we’re very red, and I get it,” he said, referring to Congressional District 11. “But this is actually why I think direct democracy is extremely important in a red district,” he said. “With direct democracy, if people are very strong about something, we don't have to go along party lines.”

Williams is taking his Ask America plan directly to voters, setting up booths at fairs, festivals, community markets and other events that draw crowds — like last Monday's Martin Luther King Jr. Parade and Festival in Clermont — in the run up to the Aug. 18 Democratic Primary where he will face fellow candidates Royal Sylvester Webster II and Barbie Harden Hall.

“I made a poster that says, I’m running for Congress in this district. Come and ask me anything. I want to explain the idea, right then and there,” he noted.

Whoever wins the primary faces the winner of the Republican Primary in the Nov. 3 general election. U.S. representatives receive a $174,000 annual salary and serve for two years.

"Weird gigs"

Williams, who bears a passing resemblance to late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmell — “It’s the beard,” he said — hails from Schererville, a Midwest town of just under 30,000, known as the “crossroad of the nation,” which, while located in northwest Indiana, is still considered a suburb of Chicago. He ended up in Orlando because his family made annual pilgrimages to Walt Disney World when he was growing up.

“We’re big fans of Disney. We’re big fans of the area, so I was here quite a lot,” he said.

Williams started working for Disney through the company’s college program while in his sophomore year at Purdue University. The summer of 1998, he worked at The Tower of Terror as a “freaky bellhop assistant” who ushered people onto the ride’s elevator before it plunged to the ground.

The following summer, he worked as a theme park character. After graduating in 2000 with a degree in interdisciplinary engineering with a focus on telecommunications, he became a full-time cast member. He’s been there for 24 years, the last few on a part-time project basis, so that he can also teach. (Before joining the faculty at Full Sail, he headed up the multi-media education department at Orlando’s International Academy of Design and Technology.)

“It’s kind of a weird gig,” Williams said. “When they need weird stuff, they give me a call.”

For starters, Williams built Disney University’s procurement system. But he also designed and crafted the sculpture in Disney University’s lobby and created the wall displays.

“My background is so strange. I have a lot of knowledge about a lot of weird things that don’t really go together normally for people. Normally, if you’re a computer programmer you have no design skills or vice versa. So when you can kind of start dreaming up an idea and then make it, that’s a huge thing that most people can’t do.”

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Williams even competed on the short-lived reality TV show that ran from 2006 to 2007 called Who Wants to Be a Superhero? where the prize was having one’s character immortalized by Stan Lee in a comic book published by Dark Horse Comics, an Original Sci-Fi Channel movie and an action figure. Williams’ alter-ego Parthenon, a trailblazing gay superhero who embodied strength and bravery, made it to the final four.

These days Williams lives “four minutes from Disney” with his partner of eight years, Rei Montalvo, a Cordon Bleu chef formerly of the Four Seasons now working for a gourmet pasta company. They have an Australian Shepherd-Corgi mix named Jolene who loves vamping for the camera.

“We are very proud dog dads,” Williams said.

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‍Professor politician

Williams launched his campaign on Oct. 18 at the No Kings rally in Clermont, telling the crowd gathered at City Hall that when he let one of his sisters know he was running for Congress, her response was Ugh.

It’s was a lead-in to explaining his Ask America plan.

“Too many people feel this way …  that their voice doesn’t matter,” he told the crowd. “I decided to do something about it.  I am an engineer. I'm a professor, and I'm a problem-solver by nature. I started thinking, How can I fix this without waiting for Congress to fix itself? And that's when I came up with my platform for Ask America.”

The crowd appeared enthusiastic. Then again, it was a rally on a gorgeous sunny fall day and folks, some wearing inflatable unicorn costumes, were fired up. They cheered him off stage when he finished his stump speech with shouts of No Kings! No Kings! No Kings!

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Williams originally intended to build the Ask America platform for other lawmakers to use, but he found it difficult to connect with anyone beyond his own representatives. He couldn’t email legislators through the Congressional message system, and he wasn’t confident that phone messages left with aides reached lawmakers either.

“The first question they ask is What’s your zip code? and if you put it in and it’s not one of theirs, they’re like Oh, sorry, you’re not in our zip code. I couldn’t even reach Maxwell Frost who is literally one district over. I started getting more frustrated with the system,” he said. “Then I was like, You know what? If nobody is interested in doing this themselves, why don't I just do it?”

Williams has always been interested in politics, he just didn’t know how to get involved. “It's not very intuitive and it's not very like, I don't even know. It's kind of not welcoming in my opinion.”

He found a path with the 50501 protests that followed President Donald Trump’s re-election in 2024. He met people who introduced him to more people; eventually he found his way to Cyn Doyle, organizer with Lake County Indivisibles. She remembers meeting him at the Tesla Takedown protest in Clermont last March.

“He was going around interviewing people, and he interviewed me,” Doyle recalled. "I think I told him we were going to have a town hall. One day he called me up and said Is there anything I can help you with? I said Oh yeah because I was the only one doing anything. I really had no help. And he was my hero. I don’t think there is a problem in this world that Dan can’t solve … He’s a fixer.”

Doyle said the town hall, held last April, was a nonpartisan event “for the community to come and ask Dan Webster questions.” Doyle said she invited the Congressman several times but that Webster’s office declined to participate, emailing back a reply that the Congressman “would not use taxpayer funded resources to participate in an event organized by a progressive political organization.”

Doyle said that in Webster’s absence, she and Williams set up a mannequin topped with a chicken head mask.

“The community lined up and asked [it] questions as if [it] was Congressman Webster,” she said.

Williams has said that if Webster does not want to answer to the people, then “we need somebody that can.” After seeing Williams handle the crowd during the April town hall, Doyle told Williams, that somebody was him. “He spoke with the community. He’s very patient. He’s got a good, calm demeanor. The stuff he was ... explaining to people and the manner he was explaining it … it was just remarkable.”

Years of making complex engineering and telecommunications concepts accessible to college students is apparently good job experience for wanna-be politicians.

“I never really thought there was a spot in politics for somebody like me because I didn't know if I had the background for it, to be quite honest," Williams said. "Then I started looking into what the House was, and I realized that we need more technical people. There's a lot of lawyers, there's a lot of politicians in there, but we need people that have other skill sets to be able to bring it to Congress, to be able to inform the other members of Congress."

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But when he met with the leader of the Orange County Democrats to let him know about his direct democracy idea and his plan to unseat Webster, he was unprepared for the response he said he got from then-chair Samuel Vilchez Santiago, now on leave while he runs for state representative in House District 47. He said that Santiago tried to wave him off from running for Congress in District 11.

“I told him what I wanted to do and he's like, Oh, well, we don't really do anything in that district 'cause it's kind of a dead district for us. Do you have any interest in running for a state seat? I was like, it's kind of a weird thing to say. It struck me as weird like that they would just write off a whole district. I know it's very red and I get it, but I didn't understand it.”

Santiago said he didn't remember the conversation that way when VoxPopuli reached out to confirm.

“lol I didn’t say that,” he said by text. “I told him that we will be working in CD 11 with a focus on HD 45, HD 39 and have been working that area ahead of the special elections in the SD 15 and HD 40 earlier in the fall. And county commission.”

Regardless, Williams is undaunted. He wants to demonstrate that this Ask America idea can work so that maybe it will catch on with other legislators and candidates too.

“I want to make sure people understand what it is. I know it’s gonna be brand-new. I know it's gonna be an experiment. And I know it's gonna be weird. It’s gonna take a lot to get it out there," he said.

"Ultimately, my hope for this is its resounding success, right?”