Defeats Won’t Hold Back Influx of Electoral Candidates from High Tech, Say Pundits

Losing won’t keep former high-tech executives from continuing to seek high public office, experts said. They said the defeats Tuesday in California of Republican nominees and former CEOs Meg Whitman from eBay for governor and Carly Fiorina from Hewlett-Packard for U.S. Senate won’t deter others. Both personal and industry reasons were cited.

"There’s always going to be someone out there with a lot of money and a big ego” from the Internet and other high-tech industries, to take up the campaign banner, “whether it’s a good idea or not,” said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a senior fellow at the University of Southern California’s School of Policy, Planning, and Development. Willie Brown, a former San Francisco mayor and California Assembly speaker, agreed.

The trend reflects the maturation of high tech into an industry whose executives appreciate that it needs to be involved in politics and public policy after having tried for years to hide from the arena, said Larry Gerston, a professor of political science at San Jose State University. It’s not a giant leap from starting to lobby to deciding, “I want to be involved in it directly,” he said. In that sense, candidates from high tech follow in the footsteps of actors from Ronald Reagan and George Murphy to Republican California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and former Carmel, Calif., Mayor Clint Eastwood, Gerston said. But there’s a difference, Brown said: “The actors are looking for jobs in most cases.”

Barring a catastrophe for high tech, “20 or 30 years from now, you'll see” high-tech executives far more involved in political activity than they have been, Gerston said. He pointed to Josh Becker, a green-energy entrepreneur from Menlo Park, Calif., and former MassPIRG activist who ran unsuccessfully for a Democratic nomination to the California Assembly, as an aspirant who will be back on the campaign trail.

Not all candidates from the industry run in California and not all fail. U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., co-founded Nextel. Democrat Maria Cantwell of Washington left politics to work at RealNetworks before returning to gain the seat she holds in the Senate.

But the spotty electoral record has mainly been built up in California, and it has been bipartisan. Steve Westly went from being eBay’s senior vice president of marketing and business development to election as the state’s controller before losing the Democratic nomination for governor in 2006 and setting up a venture-capital firm. California’s departing elected insurance commissioner, former technology entrepreneur Steve Poizner, lost the Republican nomination for governor to Whitman.

Some high-tech executives, including Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, prefer supporting ballot measures to running for office, Jeffe said. Silicon Valley was especially involved with a successful campaign for California’s Proposition 26, to require a two-thirds legislative majority to increase taxes and fees, and with the defeated Prop 23 to repeal the state’s global-warming law, which split high tech, Gerston said.

Gates and his father were among supporters of an initiative to impose an income tax on the top 1 percent of Washington state earners to pay for education and health programs. Preliminary results show the referendum lost 65-35 percent. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and software billionaire Charles Simonyi opposed the measure.