[stopping]

There's a difference between a company directly backing a candidate and employees of company backing a candidate. Most of the contributions you're referring to came from employees, which makes sense given that most well-to-do tech employees are socially liberal. It would be a mistake to attribute these donations to "big tech". You wouldn't attribute a donation from a farmer to "big agriculture".

[busterarm]

Campaign contributions are tracked and searchable by employer though. Additionally, large contributions from companies are recognized and curry favor from the parties.

For example, Morgan and Morgan was the largest corporate campaign donor (by dollars donated by employees) to Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign. John Morgan was a very vocal Clinton supporter. High level staffers from Hillary's campaign ended up attending some Morgan and Morgan company party events bringing powerful media connections with them as guests (I was there).

Also in tech companies which are socially liberal, you will have coworkers who will search for right-wing donators within the company and out them publicly (in a negative context) in Slack, etc. I've seen such messages.

[dragonwriter]

> Campaign contributions are tracked and searchable by employer though.

Which is mostly misleading – corporations represent the shared interests of their stockholders not their employees, who often have adversarial material and political interests to their employers. Corporations political participation is through corporate PACs and independent expenditures, not primarily through the direct campaign contributions of people who happen to work with them.

Interesting, while contributions are reported blindly by employer, federal election law on corporate PACs recognizes this distinction in the “restricted class” of decision–making employees from whom corporate PACs may solicit donations. It would be interesting if direct contributions by employees were divided between this “restricted class” and other employees. (Though, again, stockholders are still more indicative of corporate interest than any class of employees.)

[busterarm]

You're completely missing the point though. Companies get political favor by the donation activity of their employees and also the employees work to discourage contributions by the unfavored party.

Companies/shareholders exercise their interests by _controlling who they hire_. We even cover over this with how we recruit and demographically.

When you're talking about industries that skew towards highly paid employees (tech, legal, etc), you're actually determining winners and losers in society by political affiliation.

"Skip houses with Trump signs."

[dragonwriter]

> You’re completely missing the point though.

No, I’m disagreeing with it.

> Companies get political favor by the donation activity of their employees

No, they don’t. The general public may have no further insight and basis to assign credit or blame than FEC reports by employee donations, but actual political actors have a lot deeper understanding and, if they are inclined to reward companies for political support, are a lot more specific to the support from the firm as a firm vs support from employees which may well be orthogonal or contrary to corporate interest.