Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign is determined to make inroads with tech industry leaders, who say they felt burned by the policies of President Joe Biden.
Silicon Valley leaders were historically viewed as a Democratic voting bloc and helped President Barack Obama win in 2008. Now, some key tech leaders, most notably Elon Musk, have flocked to supporting former President Donald Trump’s third bid for the presidency. In Harris’s push to win them back, she and her allies are trying to convince top tech executives and investors that her policies will be different than that of Biden’s, according to the Washington Post.
Harris is not making hard promises many tech people are eager to see, some of which include dismissing appointees the Big Tech industry sees as hostile, people familiar with the meetings told the outlet. According to Dallas Mavericks owner and Shark Tank investor Mark Cuban, some of the courting has worked.
“They have been public about wanting to take input wherever they can regardless of party affiliation,” Cuban said of Harris’s team. “That is 180 degrees from where it had been.”
Many tech investors have been unhappy with the Biden administration’s policies, including its adoption of antitrust policies, which they claim stall acquisitions, their harsh stance on artificial intelligence, which they claim harms innovation, and their enforcement in the cryptocurrency industry.
Harris’s allies have been busy in their quest to win back the tech industry. On Monday, Harris’s brother-in-law and Uber’s chief legal officer, Tony West, visited New York for meetings with business leaders, including Fred Wilson, a prominent cryptocurrency investor. Then, on Friday, he appeared at a Washington fundraiser co-chaired by Karen Dunn, a key Harris adviser who is representing Google in court against the Department of Justice.
Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) will be at a Harris fundraiser in Seattle co-hosted by David Zapolsky, the general counsel of Amazon. Amazon is also entangled in antitrust litigation with the Federal Trade Commission.
Before the outreach to the tech industry, the Democratic Party was at risk of losing the support of the next generation of start-up founders, according to a cryptocurrency executive who attended a meeting with West who spoke with the Post.
“They’ve grown up with a Democratic Party that, on average, considers tech entrepreneurship and the [venture capital] ecosystem nothing to celebrate,” the executive said, giving them the “sentiment that the Democratic Party just doesn’t value what they’re pursuing with their life.”
The Harris campaign has sought Silicon Valley’s input on its policies. Before Harris spoke in late September in front of the Economic Club of Pittsburgh, West spoke with leaders of the crypto industry, who told him they were unsure if a Harris administration would be “just as hostile toward emerging tech” as they viewed Biden to be. The executives West spoke with proposed that Harris could forge a different path by referring to crypto as a frontier technology, like AI.
Then, in her speech, Harris promised that the country under a Harris administration would “remain dominant in AI and quantum computing, blockchain and other emerging technologies,” which was her first clear nod to the tech industry as a candidate.
Harris’s policies in the tech world typically focus on inclusivity, data protection, net neutrality, and expanding broadband access. Still, Harris has to hold together her coalition which includes liberal Democrats who have been outspoken about corporate concentration and called for the breakup of major tech companies like Google and Amazon.
It’s unclear exactly how Harris’s technology politics will be different from those of Biden. She has not said if she plans to retain Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, who has been forceful in antitrust measures against Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon.
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Still, one of the largest wins for the tech and science sectors during the Biden administration has been the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, which provided funding for research and development for environmental projects, clean energy and American manufacturing of semiconductors.
Trump’s policies would most likely walk back some protections for consumers put in place by the Biden administration, for example, the electric vehicle challenge. His platform also places a lot of focus on what Trump considers “illegal censorship” by Big Tech companies, most notably X, formerly Twitter, which banned Trump for “risk of further incitement of violence,” after the Jan. 6, 2021 riot on the U.S. Capitol.
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