Andrew Yang and Donald Trump get more support than Joe Biden from Big Tech workers

By Marcus Baram

Poor Joe Biden. He just can’t catch a break—the near-constant inability to utter a sentence without a gaffe, being the human piñata at every debate, the bleeding eye, the teeth falling out, the protesters interrupting his truly heartbreaking story of losing his first wife and daughter in a car accident. Even the sympathy he earned from the outrage over Julian Castro’s callous remark about his forgetfulness last night only served to accentuate the age question.

At this point, the only thing going for him is his stature at the top of the polls and his commanding 11.5-point lead over President Trump in a head-to-head matchup. Yet concerns are rising about the enthusiasm he can generate after last night’s debate. “There is no longer a front-runner,” declared Politico. And though Biden runs strong among African-Americans and Latinos, he’s surprisingly weak in one reliably liberal sector of the country: Silicon Valley.

In fact, more donors who work at Big Tech companies (Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft) contributed to Trump’s campaign (65 donors) and to upstart tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang (56 donors) than to Biden (50 donors), according to FEC filings for the first two quarters of this year. Biden still outraised those two candidates, hauling in $66,189 from those donors compared to just $12,251 for Trump and $33,098 for Yang. But the number of donors is in some ways a more important metric—after all, those are actual voters. And even if they donate more or less, they can only vote once.

Other surprising insights in our analysis of the fundraising numbers:

Pete Buttigieg is the fundraising king in tech. Though he lags at fifth in the polls of Democratic candidates with barely 5%, he outraised them all in Big Tech, hauling in $166,530, besting rivals Elizabeth Warren ($159,755), Kamala Harris ($131,580), and Bernie Sanders ($121,669).

Two of Big Tech’s biggest critics got plenty of love from the very companies they’ve most visibly attacked. Bernie Sanders has been on the warpath against Amazon, blasting the company’s treatment of workers and even echoing Trump’s much-derided claim that the Washington Post, owned by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, skews negative when it covers his candidacy. But Sanders was the candidate favored the most by Amazon employees, collecting checks from 65 of them, compared to only 42 for Warren and 39 for Buttigieg.

And Warren, who has made breaking up Big Tech a major plank in her platform, is extremely popular in Silicon Valley, raising $86,095 from Google employees, which is almost a quarter of all the money they’ve donated to candidates this cycle.

 
 

Fast Company , Read Full Story

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