(Bloomberg) — Texas Governor Greg Abbott likes to take credit for luring some of the world’s biggest tech companies to the state under his watch, such as Tesla Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. and Oracle Corp. But when it comes to the race for governor, people who work in the industry favor Abbott’s rival, Democrat Beto O’Rourke, by a wide margin.
Since announcing his candidacy, O’Rourke has gotten some 800 contributions from people — the vast bulk of them in Texas — who work at major tech companies including Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Meta Inc.’s Facebook, Microsoft Corp. and LinkedIn Corp. Abbott disclosed just three contributions this election cycle from people who work at those companies.
Abbott, 64, regularly touts the unprecedented economic boom in Texas during his first two terms when he’s out on the campaign trail, especially when it comes to new factories and headquarters relocations. But he’s also pursued divisive cultural issues, like banning abortion at six weeks into pregnancy, classifying transgender care as child abuse and limiting the teaching of race in schools.
While those moves play well in the Republican party, they’re far less popular among newly arriving tech workers from states like California, who tend to skew liberal.
O’Rourke, the 49-year-old former congressman and presidential candidate from El Paso, has won over liberals by backing abortion rights, limits on guns and marijuana legalization. He’s said that Abbott’s focus on culture-war issues mostly serves to divide Texans and distracts from practical concerns like shoring up the power grid after last year’s deadly blackout.
“Texas has become so extreme,” said Don Caterisano, 61, an advanced services manager at Juniper Networks Inc. who lives in Flower Mound, near Dallas. He’s made nine donations totaling $1,362 to O’Rourke’s campaign since November. “It’s just one insanity after another.”
Monetarily, the tech worker donations don’t add up to much. They total just $99,000 of the $13 million that O’Rourke has raised since entering the race in mid-November. Abbott, who polls have consistently shown with a wide lead in the race, has out-raised O’Rourke by three-to-one, pulling in $45 million since early 2021.
Abbott supporters remain highly confident of his chances of victory.
“In the end, what you’ll see is a lot of money spent by both sides, and Governor Abbott will win,” said Dennis Bonnen, a former Republican speaker of the Texas House of Representatives and ally of the governor. “The question will be by what margin.”
But the tech worker support is a sign that Abbott’s hard swing to the right is alienating workers at the very companies he’s so proud of luring to Texas. In the last decade, the Lone Star State’s population has jumped by 4 million people, many of them tech workers coming from more expensive — and more Democratic — coastal regions.
“It’s not surprising they do not support Governor Abbott because they’re moving to Texas for the job, not the politics,” said Heidi Welsh, the executive director of Sustainable Investments Institute, which tracks campaign finance data. “The evidence shows that people who work in tech companies are younger, more liberal, more likely to support racial equality issues, abortion rights, gender equality.”
To be sure, the data on campaign contributions can be imprecise, vulnerable to misspellings, abbreviations or human error that can mask a donor’s employer or name. But Bloomberg checked more than 400,000 donations in a database from the Texas Ethics Commission for ties to 80 major tech companies, mostly the members of the S&P 500 Information Technology Index. The analysis revealed a pattern of tech workers favoring O’Rourke.
The polls, however, favor Abbott. He was ahead by seven percentage points over O’Rourke in the most recent Dallas Morning News-University of Texas at Tyler poll, which was taken Feb. 8 to 15, before the primary votes that officially confirmed the two would be the candidates for their parties. The survey of 1,188 people had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
Neither Abbott’s nor O’Rourke’s campaigns replied to requests for comment.
O’Rourke has some history with the tech industry. He helped start an El Paso web-design company in 1999, Stanton Street Technology Group, and ran it for more than a decade, according to the Texas Tribune. During his run for president, he said that big tech companies should be treated more like a utility and pushed them to crack down on misinformation.
The presidential run was a bust, but O’Rourke is going after Abbott with the same fund-raising strategy he used against Senator Ted Cruz in 2018, when he lost by just 215,000 votes. It was the closest U.S. Senate race in four decades in Texas, which hasn’t elected a Democrat to a statewide office since 1994.
The Democrat has pledged not to take money from corporations. Instead, he uses an army of 56,000 volunteers to hit up individuals for money. Since November, there have been more than 216,000 donations to the campaign, with an average amount of $43.
Abbott’s been a veritable money magnet for super-rich donors in Texas and beyond. The state has few restrictions on campaign contributions, and Abbott’s biggest donors include $1 million each from oil billionaire Kelcy Warren, construction magnate James Pitcock, and telecommunications company owner Kenny Troutt.
It’s not that Beto hasn’t lured the rich into giving, it’s just that the numbers are far lower: A Houston lawyer gave $100,000, while two retirees from Westlake each made $50,000 donations. The owner of a fashion archive storage facility in Bellaire donated $50,000.
But Abbott has amassed an astounding war chest: He’s got $49.8 million on hand, trouncing O’Rourke’s $6.8 million, according to the latest disclosures, filed Feb. 22. Abbott is pouring cash into a media and campaign blitz aimed at labeling O’Rourke as a Democratic progressive who doesn’t align with Texas values.
Caterisano, the Juniper employee who donated to O’Rourke, says Texas politics have veered far rightward since he moved to the state as a teenager in the late 1970s.
“It was a live-and-let-live state,” he said in an interview. “And over the years, it’s changed. We’ve gotten more and more conservative.”
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