Democrat Jon Ossoff, in his race for a Georgia Senate seat, has raised more money from California than from Georgia. While his Republican opponent’s top two sources of funds are Georgia’s top two private employers, Ossoff’s top sources of money are Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook.
If Ossoff defeats Sen. David Perdue on Tuesday, Silicon Valley will have its own senator, even if he’ll nominally be representing Georgia.
Ossoff is dominating Perdue in terms of campaign cash, having outspent the incumbent $121 million to $73 million according to numbers released in mid-December.
Ossoff’s single biggest source of funds, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, is Google’s parent company, Alphabet.
Companies cannot contribute to candidates, but employees and executives of Alphabet had given $952,685 to Ossoff’s campaign as of the Dec. 16 filing. Apple employees and executives gave Ossoff $295,794, followed by Microsoft employees and executives who contributed $275,864. Ossoff also raised more than $225,000 from Amazon and Facebook.
Compare those numbers to Perdue’s: The Georgia Republican’s top source of funds is, sensibly enough, Georgia’s largest employer, Delta. Perdue’s second-best source of donations is Georgia’s second-largest private employer, The Home Depot. His combined haul from the employees and executives of those two companies is $239,000, less than Ossoff raised just from Amazon, his No. 5 source of funds.
Here’s another telling number: Ossoff, according to my analysis of the latest campaign filing with the Federal Election Commission, raised $4.79 million from individual California donors, compared to only $2.83 million from individual Georgia donors.
Top Google lobbyist, Leslie Miller, a vice president for Government Affairs and Public Policy, contributed the maximum $5,600 to Ossoff’s campaign. Miller runs the lobbying operation for YouTube, according to her LinkedIn page. Facebook Vice President for lobbying Will Castleberry contributed $2,800. Other Big Tech lobbyists contributed smaller amounts.
Ossoff, as a young Georgetown grad with a master’s degree, fits the demographic of the Left Coast techie-technocrat crowd. He’s a solutions-oriented problem solver who also happens to be a rabid culture warrior. Also, his favored policies profit Big Tech.
Ossoff, for instance, supports a return to federal net neutrality regulations that will help the profits of Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Content providers want to lock in place a business model whereby networks (such as AT&T or Verizon) are required to treat all data identically. An all-Democratic government could pass a robust net neutrality law, which would profit Google, Facebook, Amazon, and the others.
Ossoff, having graduated from Georgetown and worked on Capitol Hill, has always been more a creature of the Beltway than of Georgia, but his donor rolls show he’s also at home in Silicon Valley.
