Report: How Silicon Valley Is Trying to Topple Trump

Recode has published a report outlining how Democrats are attempting to use contacts within the Tech world to further their political causes.

Recode’s article titled “How Silicon Valley is trying to topple Trump — beginning with a special election in Montana” outlines how the team running the House of Representatives campaign for Democratic politician Rob Quist, “a guitar-toting first-timer in the hunt for Montana’s sole spot,” recruited Jessica Alter, a bay area resident who works to link digital tech companies with progressive candidates and causes.

Quist reportedly didn’t “have a whole lot of help from the Democratic Party’s official organs,” in his campaign and as a result was short staffed, particularly when it came to tech experts. This is where Alter steps in, running a group known as “Tech for Campaigns” with her partner Pete Kazanjy, Alter acts as a go-between for Democratic politicians in search of digital talent and engineers and designers in San Francisco and around the country.

Alter devised the idea for her company shortly after the election of President Trump, frustrated with his actions as president. “The first travel ban, the Muslim ban, put me over the edge, candidly because my father’s family was in the Holocaust, and my grandmother was very active in the Belgian underground,” Alter told Recode. “And I just imagined, what would she do?” Tech for Campaigns now has a network of nearly 3,000 volunteers comprised of data analytics and design experts from many high-ranking Silicon Valley companies such as Facebook, Netflix, Slack, and Salesforce.

Tech for Campaigns has so far aided state candidates in Virginia, a federal office-seeker in Kansas and now, Rob Quist in Montana. Tech for Campaigns helped Quist by directing his team in how to efficiently write, test, and target Facebook ads and helped the politician set up new methods of communicating with his organizers and voters via text message.

Discussing President Trump shortly before the Montana special election, Alter said “I think he was sort of a wake-up call. We do have this very large group of people who are interested in being involved, and the biggest travesty … is there just hasn’t been great resources for Democrats on the tech side that are available to a lot of people.”

Tech for Campaigns isn’t the only tech startup attempting to fight the Trump administration; Swing Left sought to raise money in crucial congressional districts in an attempt to take down major Republican players, while Resistbot attempted to make it easier for voters to alert their elected representatives of their own political views. Higher Ground Labs, run by former Obama administration digital aides, is an attempt to invest in cutting-edge tech startups.

“It definitely feels like a seminal moment, and I’ve been organizing people in the tech community for longer than just about anyone,” said Catherine Bracy, a tech expert who formerly worked on the Obama campaign, Code for America and the TechEquity Collaborative. Bracy recalled exiting a meeting along the Embarcadero one day earlier this year “and seeing a crowd of Google employees chanting and waving protest signs. And I knew then this was something different.”

Read Recode’s full article here.