Techies back Democrats in Presidential race

It will be many months before presidential candidates face their respective conventions, but for the time being the Democrats are winning the wallets of technology workers.

Finance reform bars corporations from directly funding campaigns, but that doesn’t stop individuals from backing candidates of their choice. And according to Network World’s analysis of candidates’ most recent filings to the Federal Elections Commission, those technology workers donated far more to Democratic presidential candidates than did their Republican counterparts since the inception of each candidate’s campaign. The two frontrunning Democrats outpaced the three Republicans examined: $393,444 to $36,588. Network World reviewed the campaign finance reports of the two candidates from each party who are currently leading the polls and also included former HP chief Carly Fiorina.

The FEC breaks out contributions to each presidential campaign by individual name as well as company that person works for, and Network World went through the list to pick out those from technology companies. The interactive chart below shows a full list of the technology companies. Hillary Clinton led the pack with $289,241 in contributions from this slice of donors, while fellow Democrat Bernie Sanders brought in $104,203.

In contrast, the two leading candidates in the Republican race combined did not even reach $25,000. Ben Carson leads the Republicans with $17,622 in contributions while Donald Trump has only received $5,746. Fiorina received more than twice as much as Trump, with $13,220 in donations. Her former company’s employees, however, did not show her much love by giving her only $1,877 compared to Sanders' more than $36,000 (see a breakdown by leading tech companies).

Clinton has collected from fewer people identified as tech company workers than did Sanders, but still outpaces him in overall funding from this collection of donors. Sanders’ grass-roots efforts have attracted donations from employees at 48 tech companies while Clinton is not far behind with 43. The two Democrats found common contributors from companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Red Hat, Salesforce, T-Mobile, Twitter, VMware and Yahoo.

Clinton's biggest donors were employees from Dropbox with a total of $81,000. Google employees also were generous toward Clinton at more than $47,000.

The three Republican candidates reviewed received funds from a total of 46 companies.

Contributions reviewed for this article showed that Cisco, Dell, Microsoft and Oracle employees supported all five candidates. Employees from Apple, HP and IBM supported four of the five candidates. The one candidate left out: Trump.