Democrats— and normal people who don’t want to see Trump get anywhere near the White House ever again— are getting increasingly all jazzed up as more polls come in everyday showing Kamala increasing her margin against Trump, like this one from released by Emerson College of New Hampshire voters yesterday:
Biden may have had no realistic shot; Kamala has a very realistic shot. And her followers’ enthusiasm level is through the roof. Trump is desperate to define her with one of his childish school girl nicknames but he doesn’t have the energy or the time to put into it because he’s so busy trying to ameliorate the “weird” epithet Tim Walz stuck him and Vance— and now the whole MAGA nuthouse— with.
The non-Republican slice of the billionaire class is scrambling to get on board— pushing their favorite corporate policy items and their favorite shitty potential running mates on her. On Tuesday, Theodore Schleifer reported that Mayo Pete was aggressively working his donor base minutes after Biden pulled the plug, setting “the wheels in motion for members of this close-knit network of wealthy Democrats who are again trying to propel Buttigieg to higher office. Some of them immediately began scrolling through their contact lists, reaching out on Buttigieg’s behalf to prominent Democrats connected to Harris in a loose, disjointed effort… [I]f the race to be Harris’s running mate were decided by major Democratic donors and MSNBC viewers, Buttigieg might win in a landslide… Buttigieg’s donor network, however, is an asset some other contenders cannot match.” [And, yes, there’s even worse than Mayo Pete lurking around the establishment fringes of Democratic Party.]
Funny, you would probably never hear someone like Bernie or Elizabeth Warren bragging about how popular they are with the billionaire class. That’s more of a Republican thing than a Democratic thing. Or at least it used to be.
Yesterday, Mike Isaac and Erin Griffin joined Schleifer for a somewhat related piece, More Than 100 Silicon Valley Investors Pledge to Support Kamala Harris. Could you imagine FDR pushing out that kind story line? He had big donors too but he didn't blow trumpets about it for the voters. Do you think FDR ever sent out a press release that John D. Rockefeller was a campaign donor, even though he was? So were slimy businessmen like Joseph Kennedy and Henry Morgenthau. But those names were downplayed and instead FDR electrified Democratic audiences by talking about cracking down on unscrupulous banksters— rather than selling out to the crypto-Mafia— and with speeches using lines like “We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace— business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me— and I welcome their hatred.”
Schleifer, Isaac and Griffin noted that “More than 100 venture capitalists said on Wednesday that they had pledged to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris in November and had solicited donations for her presidential campaign, in a rejoinder to the splintering mong tech leaders over whom to support in the election. The group includes Reid Hoffman, a founder of LinkedIn; Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures; Mark Cuban, the former principal owner of the Dallas Mavericks; Ron Conway, a well-known angel investor; and the billionaire Chris Sacca. ‘We are pro-business, pro-American dream, pro-entrepreneurship and pro-technological progress,’ the group said in a statement posted to their website, VCsForKamala.org. ‘We also believe in democracy as the backbone of our nation.’ The website asks people to sign a pledge to support Harris and another to donate to her campaign. The effort was buttressed by another group of tech entrepreneurs and workers called Tech For Kamala, which also wrote a letter this week expressing ‘enthusiastic and unwavering support for Vice President Harris’” The letter gathered more than 550 signatures in two days.”
I understand what Democrats are doing with this Clintonesque appeal to corporate America and the billionaire class. It’s never made me comfortable, not even when I was, as a corporate CEO, bundling money from rich Dems in a pre-online donation world. I prefer the “I welcome their hatred” approach.
The speculation from Schleifer, Isaac and Griffin was that “The moves are perhaps the most public pushback to right-wing venture capitalists and executives whom some tech leaders see as dominating political conversation in the tech community. For years, Silicon Valley was largely considered a liberal bastion. But over the past few weeks, Elon Musk, who leads Tesla [which just recalled 1.8 million defective vehicles because Musk is so terrible at his job], SpaceX and Twitter, and the [crooked crypto-]investors Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and David Sacks have endorsed Trump… While these conservatives— such as Musk, who created a new pro-Trump super PAC, and Sacks, who spoke at the Republican National Convention— never represented a majority of the rank-and-file employees in the tech industry, the right is ascendant in Silicon Valley in a way that it had not been in over a decade.
“They don’t speak for me,” said Leslie Feinzaig, a managing director of the venture firm Graham & Walker and a primary organizer of VCsForKamala, referring to Musk, Sacks and others. “They don’t speak for most of us. And they don’t speak for the founders.”
Feinzaig said the “tweet after tweet after tweet of these guys coming out and supporting Trump” was in part what had spurred the group to snap into action. She added that the effort had come together quickly over the past week as excitement over Harris’s candidacy rose and that she reached out to Hoffman.
Feinzaig circulated a Google sign-up form soliciting venture capitalists to join the pledge, calling it a “grass-roots effort” and saying it was not meant to signify an alignment with any one political party, according to a copy of the page viewed by the New York Times. Signing the pledge is a vote for “strong, trustworthy institutions,” according to the group’s website statement.
“Let’s show founders that not all V.C.s have turned MAGA,” the sign-up form read.
The investors have also launched a landing page to track donations made to the Harris campaign, although organizers said they were not actively bundling contributions.
Some Democratic donors and operatives tied to Silicon Valley privately worried that the Biden campaign had not paid close enough attention to the shifting politics in the tech industry. The Harris campaign has sought to organize Silicon Valley leaders more, and Harris, who is from the San Francisco Bay Area, is planning a fund-raising trip there as soon as next month.
Julia Collins, the founder of the climate tech start-up Planet FWD, who organized the Tech For Kamala letter, said the group is working with other tech groups and hopes to do “one of those iconic Zoom calls” to get people involved. She was referencing the series of organizing calls that supporters have held for Harris.
“What we’re building is a grass-roots movement that includes all people in tech, not just the luminaries, not just the billionaires,” Collins said.
The only polls that matter are Michigan Pennsylvania Arizona and Georgia.