Analysis of the twelve 2020 presidential candidates who received the most donations from big tech employees during the first half of 2019 has revealed that just 4% of these donations went to President Donald Trump. By contrast, over 50% of the donations from these employees went to the Democratic presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, and Kamala Harris.
Recode’s analysis looked at donations from employees at six of the largest tech companies – Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter.
In total, these employees donated $936,017 to the following 2020 presidential candidates between January and June this year with the breakdown as follows:
- Elizabeth Warren: $164,612 (18%)
- Pete Buttigieg: $163,627 (17%)
- Kamala Harris: $140,970 (15%)
- Bernie Sanders: $123,605 (13%)
- Jay Inslee: $66,668 (7%)
- Joe Biden: $66,638 (7%)
- Corey Booker: $54,189 (6%)
- Beto O’Rourke: $47,451 (5%)
- Donald Trump: $38,634 (4%)
- Andrew Yang: $33,227 (4%)
- Kirsten Gillibrand: $20,100 (2%)
- Amy Klobuchar: $16,296 (2%)
The analysis didn’t look at donations to the nine remaining 2020 presidential candidates so it’s likely that the percentage of donations to Trump during the first half of 2019 is actually even lower than 4% when all of the candidates are factored in.
When looking at the analysis of the donations to Trump from employees at each of the individual tech companies, Microsoft employees donated the most to Trump while Twitter employees donated nothing to Trump.
Here’s a breakdown of the donations to Trump from employees at these tech companies between January and June 2019:
- Microsoft: $18,818 (49%)
- Amazon: $9,638 (25%)
- Google: $5,621 (14%)
- Apple: $3,526 (9%)
- Facebook: $1,031 (3%)
- Twitter: $0 (0%)
The small percentage of donations to Trump reflects the anti-conservative bias that is often seen in leaked documents from these big tech companies. For example, recently leaked documents have shown that over 1,000 Google employees pressured the company to block conservative news outlet Breitbart News from Google’s ad network. Another Google employee also referred to the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro and conservative YouTube channel PragerU as “Nazis using the dogwhistles” in an internal email.
It also reflects the Silicon Valley political bubble which leans much further left than America as a whole. The Federal Election Commission’s (FEC) numbers show that Trump has raised the most money of all the 2020 presidential candidates ($124,369,310.76) (archive link) and accounts for 30% of the $413,899,863 that has been raised by all of the candidates – a much larger proportion than the 4% of donations that are given to Trump by employees at these big tech companies.
