Bernie Sanders’ speech in Palo Alto on Wednesday was noteworthy for what it didn’t mention. Amid his stump talk of millionaires and billionaires, nothing he mentioned, in the heart of Silicon Valley, seemed tailored to the tech industry.
Sanders, who has been on a punishing schedule of rallies across California, often attracting huge crowds, is popular with the tech sector. Four of the top five in a list of his donors’ employers are the big four – Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon. In the last quarter of 2015, he out-raised Hillary Clinton in Silicon Valley for the first time.
Sanders is hoping California will be his golden ticket to the convention: he is closing rapidly in the polls and while Clinton likely will have clinched the nomination on superdelegates before the vote even closes, a win in California might allow him to reach the convention with enough momentum to at least have an argument about superdelegates on the convention floor.
In Palo Alto, a crowd of 4,000 responded rapturously to the senator’s speech. But what, precisely, is the Bernie appeal in Silicon Valley?
The answer, according to people at the rally, was that the vast wealth being created here, and the income inequality and unaffordable housing which follows, has made this fertile ground for a message of economic egalitarianism.
“In Palo Alto, there are the people who do really well here, and everyone else is struggling to make ends meet,” said Vatche Bezdikian, an anesthesiologist on his way to lunch on University Avenue, the main street, where Facebook first rented office space. He was voting for Sanders, he said, because “a rising tide lifts all boats”.
“I think there’s definitely a Libertarian slant in Silicon Valley, but also a liberal slant,” said Waynn Lue, the founder of a technology startup. “People here believe in what Bernie Sanders is saying.
“I do think the Libertarian part of Silicon Valley is overhyped,” he said, adding that the really successful people here “don’t believe in the regulation of the industries they’re in – but no more than that.”
Jason Parry, an information security product designer who was at the Sanders rally, said his best friend was a Libertarian, but he strongly disagreed with him.
“I think that they’re a little selfish,” he said. “The thought is that if you’re just smart and study you can be a computer scientist – but you can’t.”
Parry believed Sanders could do well here, and said that he was impressed by the fact that Sanders was interested in clean energy, and clean technology.
“Under Bernie we’d pay more taxes,” he said, “but we’d be investing in education. You’d build a better base of tech workers that way.”
Donald Trump, who is also on a campaign tour through the west, has targeted farmers in Fresno and loggers a few weeks ago in Oregon, having made an appeal to coal miners in West Virginia. Clinton’s targeted outreach to Latino voters has often been so transparent as to verge on the tin-eared – in east Los Angeles on Cinco de Mayo she was criticized for pandering when she employed a Mariachi band to warm up the crowd.
In Palo Alto, Sanders resisted the urge to tailor his message for his audience. He made no mention of the behemoth corporations based in picturesque towns nearby. When he talked of the 0.1%, he made no reference to the fact that many of that class made their fortunes within a dozen miles of where he was speaking.
Instead, an increasingly sunburned Sanders, his voice hoarse, reiterated his core economic message – with one addition, as he looks toward the convention: that he is the candidate to beat Trump in the general election.
“We’re going to go win California,” he said. “We’re going to go into the convention with a lot of momentum, and I believe we are going to come out with the nomination.”
Were that to happen, he added: “Donald Trump is toast.”
