Intellectual Property Law

Obama Wins Nomination...Among Googlers Anyway

By Cynthia Brumfield

I've been playing around with FEC campaign contribution databases and hunting for patterns among different media, Internet and technology companies. The databases are huge (the Obama campaign now lays claim to more than one million individiual contributors) and unwieldly and there's no such thing as zipping right through the information.

But, after a good deal of work, I was able to aggregate individual contributions made by one leading technology company's employees: Google. The FEC data identify the employer of each contributor (although in more cases than you'd expect, that particular field is empty.)

According to my analysis of the data, contributions by Google employees to the Barack Obama campaign havce far outweighed Googlers' contributions to any other presidential candidate over the past year or so. As the chart above and the table below show, from January 2007 through January 2008, Google employees (not including contributions by Google's NetPac) collectively contributed $213,227 to Obama's presidential campaign committee, accounting for 57% of all the presidential campaign contributions made by workers at the search giant.

Hillary Clinton was a very distant second. She garnered only $67,450 in Google employee campaign contributions, accounting for only 18% of the total company employee presidential campaign donations. Surprisingly, controversial libertarian Republican Ron Paul generated only slightly less than Clinton in Google worker contributions, raising $52,400 or 14% of the total.

Aside from Ron Paul, however, Google employees stiffed the GOP. Senator John McCain, now the clear Republican nominee, received only $9,200 from Google's workers, a slight 2.5% of all Google employee presidential campaign contributions. Rudy Guiliani received only a little less, $7,900 or 2.1% of the total.

Overall, the Democratic candidates received 80.2% of the total $373,377 contributed by Google employees, with Republicans receiving 19.8% of the funds.

None of this is surprising (except for the strong showing for Ron Paul). Google's employee ranks are populated by young, highly educated workers, a key constituency for Obama. And it has long been known that Google tilts heavily toward the Democratic party, although press reports suggest that the company's lobbyists are trying to redress the imbalance, if for no other reason than to hedge their political bets.

I'll keep scanning the data as the election progresses in an effort to look at other companies and industries to see how the political contribution winds are blowing.

Full post as published by IP Democracy on March 07, 2008 (boomark / email).