Silicon Valley Not Really Feeling the Bern
Based on donor data, Brian Fung says that Bernie Sanders has a lot of fans in the dotcom biz:
This wouldn't be worth mentioning except for the fact that Sanders appears to have a broad-based appeal among Silicon Valley workers compared with his rivals. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Sanders's campaign committee seems to be by far the biggest recipient of donations from employees of Alphabet (Google's parent company), Apple, Microsoft, Amazon.com and Intel.
....This sets up a few possibilities. It's conceivable, for instance, that Clinton's support among tech companies is actually higher than what we can observe from her list....Another possibility is that tech-industry folks are donating to Clinton but in amounts too small to break into the lists we're looking at....What we can say is that Sanders appears to have much more support than Clinton across a wider range of tech companies, even if the amount of that financial support is relatively small.
Nah. Google employees are split nearly evenly between Bernie and Hillary, and employees of the other four companies probably are too. We just can't see them because their totals fall below the top 20 in Hillary's donor list. But why guess about this? All we have to do is look at the overall industry numbers. Here they are:
Compared to overall fundraising, this represents a bigger tilt toward Hillary than average. And despite the size of this sector, it represents a dismal 0.43 percent of Hillary's total campaign donations and 0.36 percent of Bernie's. So we can draw the following conclusions:
- Hillary has broader support in the internet sector than Bernie.
- Hillary gets a bigger percentage of her donations from the internet sector.
- Silicon Valley is full of cheapskates who don't care much about politics.
So there you have it.