It’s the Silicon Primary. Candidates are competing for support from rich, young techies whose libertarian tendencies defy traditional partisan loyalty. Most, like Minor, are socially liberal, but fiscally conservative and wary of regulation. When a group of House Democrats recently visited the headquarters of eBay, the online auction house, options-holding hipsters lectured them on the intricacies of encryption policy and e-commerce. Visitors took notes as Gene Hoffman, the goateed 23-year-old CEO of eMusic.com, explained the copyright implications of an MP3 player, which allows users to play music downloaded from the Internet.
Then the lawmakers were bused to Palo Alto for dinner with Marc Andreessen, inventor of the Internet browser. After the polenta cakes and Chardonnay, Andreessen received a 28th-birthday telegram from Al and Tipper Gore. After the 1996 election Gore met regularly with his Goretechs, including Andreessen, Minor and venture capitalist John Doerr.
His rivals have caught on fast. Bill Bradley assembled a network of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, many of them fellow Princeton alums, while he was on a 1998 sabbatical at Stanford. His supporters say they’ve raised $2 million in San Francisco and Silicon Valley this year, while Gore has taken in about $1 million. The Bush campaign also has raised more than $2 million. And Bush has cobbled together a high-tech council, including Michael Dell, Charles Schwab and Cisco Systems’ John Chambers, who brief him regularly on the industry’s pet issues–keeping the Internet tax-free, for one, and allowing more foreign workers to ease the high-tech labor shortage.
The notoriously tight-fisted geeks are gradually placing bigger stakes in the money-for-influence game. This year TechNet, the industry’s education and political-action group, estimates its members will contribute $7 million to $10 million to candidates, nearly twice as much as they gave in 1998. Still, high-tech donations account for only a tiny fraction of this year’s total. “People hear Silicon Valley and think, ka-ching,” says a TechNet staff member. “But we are being very strategic in our relationship-building.” Pols from either party who support the industry’s agenda eventually collect the checks. The others are sent home with T shirts and a sunburn.
The geeks are enjoying their new popularity in Washington. Andreessen has been invited to state dinners and the White House movie theater, where he watched “Shadrack” with Bill Clinton. In September, Andreessen resigned from America Online, in suburban Virginia, to start Loudcloud, a new Internet venture in the Valley. (His English bulldogs, he said, couldn’t take the Virginia heat.) He kept his $1.5 million colonial spread, located nearby, to host political events for the Virginia tech crowd. But the spare mansion didn’t look “lived in” enough, so last month the Gore campaign moved its fund-raiser to the estate of AOL chairman Bob Pittman.
One cyberstar who wasn’t invited: Halsey Minor. Despite his face time with Gore, he recently endorsed Bush. “Gore gets a lot of credit for educating people about technology,” says Minor. “But this is about who’s the right person to lead the country.” If Minor has invested in the right candidate, he will have his own turn eating popcorn in the White House theater.
