Left-wing “explainer” website Vox reports Wednesday that leading billionaires in Silicon Valley are joining forces to build a digital campaign around former Vice President Joe Biden, who is holed up in his Wilmington, Delaware, home.
Biden and the Democrats are considered far behind their rivals in building digital tools for the 2020 presidential campaign — and Biden’s technological ineptitude has become a subject of public mockery.
So others are stepping in, according to Theodore Schleifer of Vox’s “Recode”:
Joe Biden has a problem. Silicon Valley billionaires think they have a solution.
Election Day is less than six months away, and Democrats are scrambling to patch the digital deficits of their presumptive nominee. And behind the scenes, Silicon Valley’s billionaire Democrats are spending tens of millions of dollars on their own sweeping plans to catch up to President Donald Trump’s lead on digital campaigning — plans that are poised to make them some of the country’s most influential people when it comes to shaping the November results.
These billionaires’ arsenals are funding everything from nerdy political science experiments to divisive partisan news sites to rivalrous attempts to overhaul the party’s beleaguered data file. They are pushing their favored, sometimes peculiar, fixes to a political ailment just like they might if on the board of a struggling startup.
This is all unfolding as the pandemic forces campaigns to pivot away from door-knocks and packed rallies and toward data mining and influencer marketing — which in many ways play to the strengths of these tech titans, making them even more influential at a time when many in the Democratic Party are uneasy with just how powerful some in tech have become.
Read the full Vox article here.
The news of Silicon Valley’s intervention comes as Twitter has attached a fact-checking warning to two of President Donald Trump’s tweets for the first time, disputing his claim that voting by mail is more susceptible to fraud.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, is available for pre-order. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.