Among California tech donors, ‘hesitancy’ fades with Kamala Harris takeover

Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign is drawing from a reservoir of her former big-dollar donors who hadn’t given when President Joe Biden was leading the ticket. And they represent major players from a key homegrown industry for the California native: tech.

It’s a sector that had seemed to be largely supporting Republican nominee Donald Trump before Biden exited the race. Now, there’s a significant segment of tech leaders and employees who are backing Harris.

After Biden withdrew on July 21, Harris raised more than $59 million from individuals nationally for the remainder of July and over 20 percent of it — $12.5 million — came from California, according to a POLITICO analysis of her campaign’s itemized donors, released Tuesday in Federal Election Commission filings. Itemized donations typically reflect campaign funders who have given more than $200.

The tech industry plays a notable role in Harris’ support from her home state. Employees at Google and its parent company Alphabet ($262,000) made up the largest tech contributions, followed by Apple ($170,000) and Meta ($81,000).

And her campaign is also poised to win back even more individual donors in the tech industry who supported her 2020 presidential run. More than 10,000 Californians contributed to Harris in 2019, but then did not donate when she was running as Biden’s vice president, according to self-reported name and ZIP code matching. About 460 of those donors worked in tech and raised around $400,000 for her 2020 campaign. Harris also had more than $290,000 from financial sector and venture capitalist donors who didn’t give to Biden-Harris.

Those deep-pocketed and influential donors could help Harris win in November, in a race where Trump and running mate Ohio Sen. JD Vance also enjoy tech strongholds.

Andrew Byrnes, a Silicon Valley-based attorney and campaign bundler for Harris, said the only other time he’s seen this kind of mobilization was for Barack Obama. And Harris has additional tech cred. “Obama was not a Californian like Kamala is.”

This time, he said, her campaign “seems to be on the verge of a movement.”

“A pillar of the campaign, I think, will be significant engagement and enthusiasm from the people that have known her longest,” Byrnes said. “Because she is from here, many of those people are in tech.”

Out of Harris’ former supporters in tech, Google, Apple, Sony, Meta and Salesforce were the top employers of contributors. Among them are Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, former Meta security chief Alex Stamos and Twitter’s former executive chair Omid Kordestani. Benioff gave to Harris in 2019, but said in 2020 he would no longer be taking political positions as the owner of TIME magazine. Stamos’ first donation to the 2024 campaign was made the day Biden dropped out and Harris took over the ticket on July 21, according to FEC filings.

Innovators for Harris co-founder Carrie Pendolino has seen this “significant” shift among donors in real time. The national organization was first created to help get Obama elected, then Biden in 2020 and now Harris. Unlike previous election cycles, Pendolino noted the tech community was slow to get involved this year — until Harris became the nominee.

“There is that hesitancy to invest in something that you don't know the return on,” she said.

Trump senior adviser Brian Hughes said that there was no doubt around what his candidate would do for the industry. Trump’s policies will “allow the U.S. to reclaim its global dominance of innovation and technology,” Hughes said, arguing that the Biden-Harris White House has stifled innovation for four years.

“When you have dozens of industry leaders like Elon Musk and David Sacks among the long list of supporters, it is a recognition that President Trump is the clear choice,” Hughes wrote to POLITICO.

It wasn’t just uncertainty around Biden’s ability to get reelected that kept tech donors on the sidelines, but also his administration’s agenda. LinkedIn co-founder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman, who is backing Harris, publicly called on her to replace Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan, whose anti-merger actions are “waging war on American business,” he said.

And another entrepreneur, mobile gaming company Zynga founder Mark Pincus, said on X on July 23 that he’s against Trump, but would sit out the election if Harris “veers left (as Biden was starting to),” citing Biden’s “recent proposals for price caps and taxes” in another post . While he didn’t donate to Harris’ 2020 presidential race, Pincus donated to Biden’s campaign in December 2023, FEC filings show.

Now, the industry is stepping up for the Democratic Party, both with donations and involvement. And, in some cases, Silicon Valley leaders who were leaning toward Trump are “changing their minds” with Harris at the top of the ticket, according to Pendolino, who declined to name specific people.

Cybersecurity professionals raised more than $150,000 for her campaign during one sideline event at a hacking conference earlier this month. Silicon Valley tech lawyers signed up to bundle donations just hours after Biden withdrew from the election . And over 200 venture capitalists and tech leaders pledged their support to Harris — a group commitment intended to “push back to the narrative” that Silicon Valley is divided between Harris and Trump, tech executive and major Democratic bundler Steve Spinner told POLITICO in July .

Harris taking over the campaign has also energized people who don’t typically get involved in the political field — like Waseem Daher, the San Francisco-based founder of a bookkeeping startup who pledged to match donations up to $1 million and then spread the funds among Harris’ campaign, the DNC and Democratic state parties. That prompted venture capitalist Ron Conway to say he’d donate $10,000 more.

“$1m is a double-digit percentage of my total net worth so this isn't a casual thing for me,” Daher wrote . “I've never donated to a presidential campaign before, but it feels like so much is at stake in this election.”

It’s still unclear what Harris’ policies will be on industry priorities, namely capital gains tax and regulations for artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency.

She has a mixed record on tech. Harris has been more outspoken than Biden when advocating for AI regulations and data privacy . But she’s also formed alliances with industry leaders , including Conway and former Meta chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg. Her sometimes friendly approach to tech seems to be ramping up since her campaign launched; her team reportedly reached out to crypto firms in late July, around the same time that several House Democrats urged the Democratic National Committee to support pro-crypto policies in its platform — a step away from Biden’s hostility toward crypto.

Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, has a solid record on tech policy , though he’s received very little in donations from the industry in the past. Walz was one of the first governors to prohibit deepfakes in elections, enacted an executive order to bolster oversight of cyber threats and signed a consumer data privacy bill, among other policies.

The gray area in Harris’ tech platform isn’t actually a concern for many in the industry, Pendolino claimed. As opposed to rooting for her policies, they’re rooting for a candidate who they believe will listen to the needs of the industry.

“She's been part of the rise of Silicon Valley by living and breathing it in the Bay Area,” Pendolino said. “So I think it's an intuitive thing that we can discuss things with her administration.”

Pendolino noted that Harris’ brother-in-law, Tony West, was the chief legal officer for Uber, which adds to the industry’s comfortability. West is one of the people who donated to Harris’ 2020 run but didn’t donate to the 2024 campaign before Biden withdrew. Earlier this month, he announced an unpaid leave from Uber to help with her campaign .

Meanwhile, Trump has made a concerted effort to paint himself as the pro-crypto candidate , even supporting the idea of establishing a reserve of Bitcoin assets. He’s gained notable endorsements from Elon Musk and venture capitalists David Sacks, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and Doug Leone. Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, founders of the crypto platform Gemini, said they each donated $1 million in Bitcoin to Trump .

Vance, a former Silicon Valley biotech executive, hopes to revamp federal oversight of crypto , though he also supports antitrust enforcement of Big Tech, an issue the Biden administration has carried out in full force. Musk, Sacks and others reportedly urged Trump to select Vance as his running mate, POLITICO previously reported .

On a podcast hosted by Andreessen and Horowitz, the a16z venture capital founders made their case for supporting Trump, calling his crypto platform a “flat out, blanket endorsement of the entire space.” They criticized Biden’s proposal to tax unrealized capital gains, AI restrictions and his veto of a rollback on SEC’s cryptocurrency policy that gained bipartisan support in Congress.

“The future of our business, the future of technology, new technology and the future of America is literally at stake,” Horowitz said . “For little tech, we think Donald Trump is actually the right choice.”

But Trump’s support isn’t “reflective of a broader move in the Valley,” according to Byrnes, the tech attorney who backs Harris. Similarly, people not giving to Biden before he withdrew doesn’t indicate the industry as a whole was hostile toward him — “tech is not a monolith, politically or otherwise,” he added.

The thousands of other Harris 2020 donors who did not give to Biden-Harris also show that the vice president’s California fan base stretches beyond Silicon Valley.

Much of her support for the 2020 run was rooted in her past experiences as a district attorney in San Francisco and Alameda counties, California’s attorney general and a U.S. senator. From Harris’ California donors that didn’t give for Biden’s 2024 race, she raised over $1.2 million from government and legal employees, a third of which came from the Bay Area.

“She’s a listener,” Byrnes said. “She has listened to the tech industry, as she has other industries, and her policies have reflected that understanding of what's really happening on the ground, in tech and in innovation.”