Among campaign donors working for the 200 major tech companies, Bernie Sanders picked up 33,094, Hillary Clinton pocketed 2,087, while Donald Trump received only 52, CNN Money and Crowdpac report.
Silicon Valley has earned the nickname of “Valley of the Democrats” from the TechCrunch blog, because the vast majority of tech CEOs actively supported Barack Obama’s 2012 Presidential re-election bid and 83 percent of their employees’ campaign contribution donations went to Obama. Peter Thiel, Co-Founder of Pay-Pal and Palantir, commented, “Most of Silicon Valley, most of the executives, tend to be Democrats.”
It should not be surprising that tech companies overwhelmingly support the party of “Big Government,” because the federal government is tech’s biggest customer. Despite (shifting) congressional budgetary constraints, federal spending on information technology is expected to hit a record $86.4 billion in 2016 and continue to climb in the future.
Commenting on the migration of the professionals from the Republican Party to the Democrats, Columbia journalism professor Thomas B. Edsall observes, “The replacement of working-class whites with upscale professionals has turned the Democratic coalition into an alliance with a built-in class division.”
Tech Democrats embrace economic disruption, unlimited high-skilled immigration, expansive trade deals, and performance-based funding that encourages charter schools to abandon teacher unions and adopt the management model of a modern startup.
Bernie Sanders in the 2016 election cycle has trounced Hillary Clinton by picking up 93 percent of tech campaign contributions to her 7 percent. Donald Trump, as the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, has only received one tenth of one percent of tech contributions, according to the non-partisan Crowdpac website.
Clinton may have received only a fraction of the number of contributions, but as the only establishment Democrat in the race, the average dollar size of her tech contributors was $1,341. That compares to an average of just $404 for Trump and $181 for Sanders.
Trump had never, until recently, asked for contributions to his campaign and spent a good amount of his campaign hammering Apple and other Silicon Valley companies for offshoring their manufacturing.
Intel CEO Brian Krzanich had scheduled a fundraiser with Trump and his campaign leadership at his Silicon Valley home on June 1. But after the New York Times outed plans for the event, it was quickly canceled.