Hours after President Joe Biden announced he was dropping out of the 2024 presidential race, Silicon Valley Democratic megadonors were already lining up to support Vice President Kamala Harris at the top of their party’s ticket.
“This is the right thing to do for our country and our democratic future,” Reid Hoffman, co-founder and CEO of LinkedIn and founder of Greylock Ventures, wrote on X. Last week, Hoffman had endorsed a call between 300 Democratic donors and Harris and encouraged members of his network to join the call, according to The New York Times.
“Kamala Harris is the American dream personified, the daughter of immigrants who met at Cal. She’s also toughness personified, having risen from my hometown of Oakland, California, to become the state’s top prosecutor,” Dmitri Mehlhorn, a former political adviser to Hoffman, tells WIRED. “Now that Scranton Joe is stepping down, I can’t wait to help elect President Harris.”
Aaron Levie, chief executive of the multibillion-dollar cloud storage company Box and a Democratic donor who hosted a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton in 2015, quoted Biden’s resignation letter on Twitter, saying: “Wow. Amazing leadership. Now, let’s go!”
These calls for support are a major turnaround since Biden’s disastrous performance in last month’s debate sent donors reeling over his chances of winning reelection. As pressure mounted on Biden to drop out, Hoffman told WIRED earlier this month that like-minded Silicon Valley megadonors were putting off the possibility of further donations. “It’s definitely caused a ton of turmoil,” he said at the time.
“Both donors and grassroots Democrats were a little worried before the debate, but in the weeks since then her candidacy has become almost impossible. The gap went from being surmountable to seemingly insurmountable,” Manny Yekutiel, a San Francisco-based Democratic organizer who once served as Hillary Clinton’s deputy finance director in Northern California, tells WIRED. “This now opens the floodgates for increased enthusiasm for the election, the candidacy, and the convention. It will make it much easier to organize.”
Donations already appear to be pouring in. Harris’ presidential campaign raised more than $27.5 million in small-dollar donations in the first few hours after announcing she would seek the nomination. ActBlue wrote in a Sunday post on X.
“This opens the floodgates,” said one senior tech executive who has worked on multibillion-dollar software products in Silicon Valley and asked to remain anonymous because she did not want to be seen as representing her current or former companies.
“Fundraising for Biden really plummeted, to the point where fundraisers switched to raising money for congressional campaigns because there wasn’t a lot of money coming in from big donors for Biden. I assume we’ll now see a blockbuster fundraising day when the numbers come out tomorrow,” he told WIRED on Sunday.
As donations from the left reportedly dried up in recent weeks, Silicon Valley leaders like Elon Musk, venture capitalist David Sacks and the founders of the prestigious venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz came out in support of former President Donald Trump and his vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance after last week’s assassination attempt, vowing to millions of dollarsWhile people like Sacks and Musk have said the tech industry was growing more comfortable with the former president’s re-election, there is still little evidence to suggest a radical shift in Silicon Valley’s political leanings.