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Comment by kevingadd | Hacker News Reader

This bias is overstated, if it's even true at all. There are plenty of conservatives in tech with lots of money and power, many of them run hosting companies or CDNs. Trump is easily one of the most reviled figures out there right now and he's had no problem operating an entire social media service of his own, for example. And conservative politicians do just fine - big tech CEOs and founders show up to meetings with them and make donations all the time.

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Do you live in Silicon Valley? I've lived here for 15 years. All of my friends are liberal, The DPI (Democratic Performance index) of my precinct is D+95. That's North Korean level of political obedience. I'm one of just 18 people in my precinct to vote for the GOP. Looking around my precinct its not looking much better. In fact, in the Bay Area, not a single county has voted for the GOP since 1980. In California, the Dems have a supermajority. You could sift through political donations of every single tech company and they give at a 1:25 ratio to the Democrats. I'm not sure about your CEO comment either, a super majority of billionaires are leftists today.

Generalizations like "the tech industry has a liberal bias" are so reductive that they aren't useful. One of the pitfalls in discussions about the overall politics of the tech industry is a lack of nuance. Another is a general inability to ask the important question "who has the power in this industry?"

Is Elon Musk liberal? What about Paul Graham, Larry Ellison or Peter Thiel?

There is an enormous difference in the politics of rank and file employees at most tech companies and the founders/executives/management. This is true of nearly every industry. If you think the biases of regular tech workers matter more than the biases of the management and leadership of these companies — or fail to make a distinction — then you will probably come to a different conclusion about the biases of the industry as a whole.

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