Tech Flooded Campaign Spending in 2020, Largely Tied to Antitrust, Ridesharing Policies

While the tech sector isn’t heavily known for political spending, 2020 was different. The industry spent heavily, largely related to upcoming antitrust legislation, and largely on Democrats, the party most responsible for bringing up the antitrust legislation.

In the 2020 election, tech companies would contribute at least $211 million to federal political campaigns according to data from OpenSecrets. To state and local campaigns, it was over $5.5 million, easily double any other election in the last twenty years (although over $4.4 million was spent in 2000) based on data from Follow The Money. Over $55 million would be spent on California ballot initiatives alone, also easily over twice what was spent in any prior election year.

Those state numbers don’t include contributions from companies like Uber and Lyft that are listed under transportation and ridesharing categories. They spent over $83 million, more than ten times what they spent in any prior election.

Such tech companies appeared near the top of the list of contributors for the year across all elections. Lyft, Uber, and Doordash were the 7th, 9th, and 10th largest spender that year sitting near billionaire political donors like Michael Bloomberg, Jay Pritzker, and Ken Griffin. For prior years, their political giving was negligible.

The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, led by Facebook/Meta’s chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, spent $29 million alone.

While many tech companies aren’t regularly active in politics, larger tech companies like Facebook and Google are, mainly through their employees. There is no distinction in the data as to whether employees individually donate to political parties on behalf of the company they work for—in the way company lobbyists do—or for personal reasons.

In 2020, Facebook spent almost $7 million, 92 percent of that going to Democrats, mostly coming from Facebook employees. The company’s spending, by employees or otherwise, is relatively new.

In 2012, total political donations barely topped $600,000. By 2016, it was almost $5 million. While the largest recipient has been Democratic presidential candidates, like Joe Biden and Hilary Clinton, the majority is spread across a wide range of Congressional and Senatorial candidates. Facebook’s political action committees (PACs) appear to be more non-partisan, donating almost equal amounts to each party’s host committee in 2016 ($1.4 million to Democrats, $1 million to Republicans), but pales in comparison to employee giving.

Why Donate Now

Why the giant wellspring of political giving from an industry that hasn’t been particularly political? In short, the industry has seen a large amount of policy aimed at labor and antitrust issues in a short amount of time. The political donations come as the industry is also heavily lobbying on those same issues.

Most of that spending is related to California ballot initiatives—Proposition 15 and Proposition 22. For the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, it spent at least $25 million supporting Proposition 15—which would raise commercial real estate taxes on high value properties without changing residential tax assessments. The measure did not pass. They also spent at least $2.25 million against a separate ballot measure aimed at eliminating cash bail.

Uber, Lyft, Doordash, Instacart, and Postmates would spend over $205 million in support of Proposition 22 that would exempt rideshare drivers from being qualified as full employees, eligible for health benefits and other protections.

California’s lack of spending limits on ballot initiatives regularly means a massive flood of dollars into the campaign finance system, sometimes with few Federal Communications Commission (FCC) filings to show for it and little indication on where the money goes.

Just prior to the ballot initiative vote, some of the rideshare companies were sued by the San Francisco district attorneys’ office in 2020 headed by Chesa Boudin for violating a recent law, Assembly Bill 5 passed in January, that qualified rideshare drivers as employees.

Additionally, in 2020 Uber would have to face a lawsuit that it violated antitrust laws in pushing out a rival, Sidecar.

At the federal level, tech companies have been the target of at least five antitrust bills. One bill would limit tech companies from giving preference to their own product, say if Google gave a higher preference to Google products in their search results. In this situation, tech companies have been at odds with each other, with the review site Yelp in support of the antitrust legislation and Google’s parent, Alphabet, against.

The large jump in tech company donations weren’t limited to companies directly targeted by the legislation, but appeared to come from all tech companies across the board. Large tech companies like Oracle, IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Tencent, and others would spend easily more than double in 2020 than any other prior federal election year.

Potentially related to the legal policy changes in California, there were questions at the time that tech companies might move out of the state, but most of them were simply rumors. While companies like Tesla, Oracle, and Palantir would make a move out of the state, other rumored companies, including Uber and Airbnb have not.

Funding the Party of Antitrust

But while tech companies have a vested interest in the outcome of antitrust legislation, the vast majority of tech funds are going to Democrats—the party most likely to bring antitrust bills up for a vote. According to The Hill, without a Democratic majority in the House, antitrust would probably not happen this session.