Vendors spread donations among presidential candidates

In the race for president, there's no clear candidate for CIOs, based on publicly available records of campaign contributions. But top executives at technology vendors favor Barack Obama.

In an informal, not statistically valid survey of The Center for Responsive Politics online database of campaign contributors, we looked up the 2007 and 2008 financial contributions of about 50 high-profile CIOs and about 50 senior executives at technology companies.

Among the CIOs, just 15 of the 50 are on record contributing directly to the presidential candidates. Of those who gave money to the three candidates who have made it this far, three CIOs went for Barack Obama, one for John McCain and none contributed to Hillary Clinton. Dave Kepler at Dow Chemical gave $4,600 to McCain. Gregor Bailar, former CIO of Capital One, and Joe Smialowski, former CIO of Freddie Mac, each gave $2,300 to Obama. Jana Schreuder of Northern Trust gave Obama $4,600.

Of the others, five supported Chris Dodd. Three CIO contributions each went to Rudy Guiliani, Bill Richardson and Mitt Romney. John Edwards and Ron Paul apparently didn't appeal to these CIOs; those politicians got nothing from them.

Among vendor executives, Obama edges out Clinton, 17 contributions to 14. However, as our chart shows, four of those contributors hedged their bets by giving money to both candidates. McCain trails with six contributions.

Vendor executives have been a bit more targeted, and on target, in their financial support than CIOs have been. From the start, the three strong candidates got more support from vendor bigwigs than did later-dropouts such as Romney and Dodd.

The guys from Oracle, however, are no oracles. Jeff Henley, chairman of Oracle, was alone in his support for Ron Paul, giving him $1,000. Charles Phillips, Oracle's president, was the single John Edwards contributor in this group, giving $2,100 to that campaign.

Then again, maybe Paul and Edwards will be the veep choices for, respectively, McCain and whoever arms wrestles the most delegates at the Democratic National Convention.