[snowwrestler]

Those numbers are for individual donations; donors are legally required to disclose employer, but that doesn’t mean their employer was directing their donations.

To look at the “tech industry,” look at company-directed activity, primarily lobbying expenditures, corporate PAC donations, senior exec political donations, and especially the same categories at industry groups like trade associations. That picture is far more balanced between the parties.

BTW I would suggest looking elsewhere for your political info, Newsweek does terrible reporting on this stuff. The article you quote makes a basic mistake, confusing 98% of donations going to Democrats with 98% of employees giving to Democrats. Most Netflix employees did not make any political donations at all in 2020 (or indeed, ever).

[acdha]

I’d also add that there were two events relatively close to each other which I think shaped this a lot: California proposition 8 blocking gay rights in 2008 and the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United to legalize dark money. The cruelty of Prop 8 spurred unusual levels of reputational consequences for backers (on HN, notably Mozilla’s Brendon Eich) and I think that really pushed Silicon Valley Republicans to try to cloud as much of their donation history as possible. They can say our company supports diversity, donate to their company PAC, which donates to another PAC, and when that PAC backs something unpopular there isn’t a direct donation trail making it easy to have “<>.com executive J. Blow backed this candidate” blow up on social media or deter prospective hires.

That trend is only going to strengthen as the Republican Party stakes out positions which are unpopular outside their core supporters.

[snowwrestler]

To be clear, donations from a person to a corporate PAC, and subsequent donations by that PAC, were not affected by Citizens United.

Citizens United removed limits on “outside expenditures,” but disclosure is still required. Netflix reported no outside expenditures in 2020, for expample (also viewable at Open Secrets).