Political contributions from tech employees

The year-end campaign reports filed on January 31 provide information on how candidates raised money. I looked at contributions to four Democrats and five Republicans from five technology companies: Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Ebay and Microsoft. The following graphs show these contributions first by company and and then by candidate. (Disclosure: I've contributed to the Obama campaign.)




Some observations:

• Ranked by total dollars raised, the top three candidates are: Clinton (38% of all money raised), Obama (29%), Paul (22%). Together, these three candidates took in 89% of the money contributed.


• Clinton raised the most money with 68% coming from Microsoft employee contributions of $86,360. In terms of raw dollars, both Microsoft and Ebay employees prefer Clinton, Google employees prefer Obama, Yahoo and Amazon employees prefer Paul.


• Microsoft employees contributed the most money in total at $169,421, but Google contributed the most per employee. Google employees contributed $111,160 which works out to $6.61 per capita (based on end of year head count data). This far exceeds the other four companies' per capita contributions which range from $0.64 (Amazon) to $2.14 (Microsoft).


• Given the strength of Ron Paul's fund raising, I'd conclude that technology workers skew fairly libertarian. And not as liberal as you might expect given that neither Kucinich or Edwards did not fare particulaly well.


• The presumptive GOP nominee, John McCain, was in 4th place among Republicans. Huckabee was the worst-performing Republican ($1,550) and Kucinich the worst-performing Democrat ($4,250).