In Silicon Valley, Technology Talent Gap Threatens G.O.P. Campaigns

President Barack Obama won the nine counties of the Bay Area by margins ranging from 25 percentage points (in Napa County) to 71 percentage points (in the city and county of San Francisco). In Santa Clara County, home to much of the Silicon Valley, the margin was 42 percentage points. Over all, President Obama won the election by 49 percentage points in the Bay Area, more than double his 22-point margin throughout California.

Although San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley have long been liberal havens, the rest of the region has not always been so. In 1980, Ronald Reagan won the Bay Area vote over all, along with seven of its nine counties. George H.W. Bush won Napa County in 1988. Republicans have lost every county in the region by a double-digit margin since then. But Democratic margins have become more and more emphatic. Obama’s 49-point margin throughout the Bay Area this year was considerably larger than Al Gore’s 34-point win in 2000, for example, or Bill Clinton’s 31-point win in 1992. The reason is that Democrats’ strength in the region is hard to separate out from the growth of its core industry — information technology – and the advantage that having access to the most talented individuals working in the field could provide to Democratic campaigns.

Companies like Google and Apple do not have their own precincts on Election Day. However, it is possible to make some inferences about just how overwhelmingly Democratic are the employees at these companies, based on fund-raising data. Over all, among the 10 American-based information technology companies on Fortune’s list of “most admired companies,” President Obama raised 83 percent of the funds between the two major party candidates.