september 16–29, 2019 | new york 37part of the campaign circuit for aspirants
aiming to prove their savvy.
The general cooling has shown up in
more conspicuous places as well. Whereas
tech giants co-sponsored many primary
debates in recent election cycles—Face-
book hosted two Democratic and two
Republican debates in the 2016 race,
while Twitter and YouTube each spon-
sored a Democratic one—this spring the
companies made it clear to the debates’
organizers that they would no longer par-
ticipate. Onstage at the first debate in
June, Booker was pushed to name specific
companies when discussing the dangers
of corporate consolidation, and he
responded with a juxtaposition that would
have been unthinkable a few years earlier.
“I will single out companies like Hallibur-
ton or Amazon that pay nothing in taxes,”
Booker said. No one batted an eye at the
comparison of Amazon (which had hosted
a big presidential address from Obama in
his second term) to Dick Cheney’s old
company, and the moderators moved on.
TECH’S BATTERED IMAGE goes only
so far in explaining the Democratic Party’s
retreat. Tech overreach may have been just
as important—Silicon Valley billionaires’
being unwilling or unable to play nice with
political veterans and what the tech crowd
saw as their old, fusty rules when they did
choose to get involved.
LinkedIn co-founder Reid
Hoffman, for one, let the Demo-
cratic Establishment know he
meant to innovate them into the
future over the weekend of
Trump’s inauguration. Hoff-
man—who’d advised Obama and
Clinton, then finished Election
Night 2016 by watching The West
Wing’s pilot—stood alongside
Zynga founder Mark Pincus at a
secluded gathering of party
donors in southern Florida and
pitched them on a platform that
would empower voters to pick
issues to pressure Congress about.
That project was greeted with
groans when shared more widely,
like many “disruptive” initiatives brought
to Democrats in the aftermath of that
humbling election. “It’s hubris that these
folks believe they can do anything and
everything better than anyone else and
that if you just give them some time and
money they’ll be able to fix it,” one senior
party leader told me.
This dynamic was well illustrated by
WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann,
who’d never demonstrated much interest
in domestic politics before. (Hoffman, at
least, has been a big Democratic supporter
for years.) The Israeli-born businessman,
who in the past few weeks has reportedly
decided to cut the valuation of his com-
pany precipitously in advance of an IPO,
recently talked with a political pro about
the feasibility of changing the laws so peo-
ple not born in the U.S. could run for
president. He was told that this would be
quite an undertaking and that it was unre-
alistic—it would require a change to the
Constitution. Neumann was then asked if
he might consider running for governor or
mayor in New York. According to some-
one familiar with the conversation, he
replied, “Once you’ve reached my level of
success, only president will do.” (A person
close to Neumann says he was kidding
about the requirements for running for
office and denied he said that line.)
Dustin Moskovitz, perhaps the least-
known Facebook co-founder, rose from
obscurity in late 2016 to become the Dem-
ocrats’ newest megadonor, one multimil-
lion-dollar check for liberal groups at a
time. Others, such as Hoffman’s LinkedIn
co-founder Allen Blue, launched groups
like DigiDems, promising to help the par-
ty’s political-technology efforts. It looked at
first like a new era for Democrats’ relation-
ships with their Silicon Valley backers, and
the party’s central infrastructure responded
in kind: The DNC began its internal data
overhaul by hiring Raffi Krikorian, an
Uber and Twitter engineering alum.It took only months for cracks to show. In
Krikorian’s first speech to DNC partners, in
October 2017 in Las Vegas, the political
novice sought to rouse the crowd by lauding
the democratization of data and calling for
access to the party’s voter files to be granted
to all who consider themselves Demo-
crats—not realizing this would endanger a
major revenue stream for state Democratic
Party organizations and potentially endan-
ger incumbent lawmakers.
Meanwhile, Hoffman had partneredwith a Democratic operative named
Dmitri Mehlhorn and formed an all-pur-
pose political shop called Investing in US,
which sent Hoffman’s considerable money
to a huge range of new initiatives, includ-
ing widely heralded resistance-era groups
like Run for Something and Indivisible.
But in Virginia, the site of the group’s first
major electoral investments, party officials
who had originally been thrilled with
Hoffman’s efforts and involvement began
to chafe. They believed Mehlhorn was
pressuring them to use political tools from
Higher Ground Labs, one of the Investing
in US beneficiaries. At the same time, he
was funding an outside group, WinVir-
ginia, rather than directly supporting local
candidates in need of financial help. This
group plowed money into conservative
legislative districts even as Virginia’s
Democratic leaders pleaded with it—
unsuccessfully—to spend in more moder-
ate areas they were already targeting. At
one point, WinVirginia asked for access to
the state party’s voter-data file only to be
rejected by fed-up officials. Mehlhorn
didn’t help matters in their eyes when he
took what local pols saw as a victory lap
that fall, claiming credit for Democrats’
widespread wins.
But by then, his reaction wasn’t much of
a surprise to D.C. Democrats. When
Mehlhorn arrived for a meeting with a
Democratic super-pac about potential
collaborations on projects, including Ala-bama’s 2017 Senate race, things quickly
went off the rails. Operatives there said
they found him nervous to the point of
paranoia when it came to security threats.
As he spoke to them, at first he occasion-
ally skipped words and wrote them down
on a whiteboard instead, as if to avoid
being recorded. Then, as the political
team members explained their work to
him, he asked how in-depth their message
testing was. One of the operatives
responded that it had matched the popu-“I run Facebook, and she’s
a presidential candidate calling
to break Facebook up.
Of course I’m concerned.”