Hours after President Joe Biden announced he was dropping out of the 2024 presidential race, big Democratic donors in Silicon Valley were already lining up to support Vice President Kamala Harris, who tops the party’s shortlist.
“This is the right thing to do for our country and the future of our democracy,” Reid Hoffman, co-founder and chairman of LinkedIn and partner at Greylock Partners, wrote on X. Hoffman endorsed a conference call between 300 Democratic donors and Harris last week, and urged members of his own network to join the call, according to The New York Times.
“Kamala Harris is the embodiment of the American Dream, the daughter of immigrants I met at the University of California, and the embodiment of toughness, having risen from my hometown of Oakland, California, to become the state’s top attorney,” Dmitri Melhorn, a former political adviser to Hoffman, told WIRED. “With Scranton Joe stepping down, I can’t wait to help elect Harris for president.”
Aaron Levy, CEO of the multibillion-dollar cloud storage company Box and a Democratic donor who hosted a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton in 2015, reposted Biden’s resignation letter on X, saying, “Wow. Great leadership. Let’s get started!”
The calls for support mark a major turnaround since Biden’s dismal performance in last month’s debates left donors spooked about his reelection chances. As pressure mounted for Biden to back down, Hoffman told WIRED earlier this month that like-minded Silicon Valley megadonors were holding back on further contributions. “It’s definitely caused a huge stir,” he said at the time.
“While donors and rank-and-file Democrats were a little worried before the debate, in the weeks since the debate, his candidacy has become all but impossible. The gap has gone from surmountable to insurmountable,” Manny Yekutiel, a San Francisco-based Democratic organizer who once served as Hillary Clinton’s deputy financial director for Northern California, told WIRED. “This will instantly increase enthusiasm for the election, the candidates, and the convention, and make organizing much easier.”
Donations already appear to be pouring in: Harris’ presidential campaign raised more than $27.5 million in small donations in the first few hours after announcing she was seeking the nomination, ActBlue reported in a post on X on Sunday.
“This certainly opens the floodgates,” said one top IT executive who works in multibillion-dollar software products in Silicon Valley and asked not to be identified because he didn’t want to be seen as a representative of his current or former company.
“Fundraising for Biden has really plummeted, and fundraisers have switched to fundraising for the congressional races because big donors aren’t giving as much to Biden. I expect we’ll see a big fundraising boom when the numbers are released tomorrow,” she told WIRED on Sunday.
With donations from the left reportedly drying up in recent weeks, Silicon Valley leaders Elon Musk, venture capitalist David Sachs and the founders of prestigious venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz have pledged millions of dollars in support of former President Donald Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance after last week’s assassination attempt. While people like Sachs and Musk say the tech industry has become increasingly accustomed to the former president being re-elected, there is still little evidence of a major shift in Silicon Valley’s political leanings.
