by Catherine Smith
A new Wired report shows overwhelming support from Silicon Valley employees for Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden. The magazine states that almost 95 percent of donations from employees at Silicon Valley tech giants such as Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Oracle went to the Democratic presidential nominee, Breitbart reports.
Wired reports that employees from the tech firms have contributed 20 times as much money to Biden as to Trump since the start of 2019.
It’s been long understood that many tech oligarchs and their employees oppose President Trump. In 2016 Silicon Valley also largely donated to Hillary Clinton.
The data is from the Federal Election Commission (FEC), an agency that requires people who donate $200 or more to a presidential campaign to include who they work for. Wired states that employees at the six companies listed have contributed a total of $4,787,752 to Biden while only $239,527 has gone to Trump.
Breitbart writes “Employees at Alphabet are Biden’s biggest financial backers in Silicon Valley according to the filings, donating almost $1.8 million to his campaign. This accounts for more than one-third of the money raised from employees of the six companies. According to the campaign finance watchdog Open Secrets, contributions from Alphabet’s employees and political action committee collectively exceed those from any other company. Open Secrets claims that Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple account for five of the seven largest donors to the Biden campaign on that basis.”
Wired reports:
“Employees at the sixth company in WIRED’s analysis, Oracle, have been less one-sided in their contributions. Roughly 20 percent of the contributions by Oracle employees have gone to Trump, compared with less than 10 percent at each of the other companies. The next-highest share going to Trump is at Microsoft, where nearly 8 percent of the money contributed to the presidential campaigns has gone to Trump. Of the six companies, Microsoft employees contributed the most total money to the Trump campaign—$75,428.
WIRED’s analysis shows that employees at these six companies are contributing substantially more to both nominees than during the 2016 election. Donations to the Biden campaign are nearly twice those made to Hillary Clinton’s over the same period four years ago; Trump has raised more than four times as much money from employees at the six companies.
Big tech has a lot riding on the election. Members of Congress are probing potential antitrust violations by several of the companies; they also are considering changes to a 1990s-era law that essentially absolves website owners of responsibility for what users post on their site. Tech executives have criticized Trump’s increasingly hard line on China, a big trade partner, and on immigration, a source of many Silicon Valley employees”.
According to Wired’s report, Biden “has on the whole, struck a warmer note with big tech. He isn’t as interested in cratering America’s relationship with China, which would be a net win for Silicon Valley”.
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Catherine Smith reports for American Greatness.
Photo “Joe Biden” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.
