Silicon Valley Not Really Feeling the Bern

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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.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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