Kamala Harris has a key qualification to be Joe Biden’s running mate: the ability to schmooze with billionaires and usher in “Silicon Valley excitement and money galore.”
Vox reports she built her campaigns for district attorney, state attorney general and U.S. senator on “old-money families” but then immediately went targeted Silicon Valley when the modern tech boom arrived.
Harris has “glad-handed with San Francisco elites for decades,” Vox reported, and is seen as key to Biden’s campaign, which has “struggled until recently to excite the wealthiest and most powerful tech moguls.”
“Harris will bring superfans from the billionaire class that will supercharge Democrats’ coffers, even though it makes Biden more dependent on these big donors,” the report said.
Biden’s pick also reassures the tech industry that he will steer away from policies pushed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and others who want to break up the tech giants.
Cooper Teboe, a Democratic fundraiser in Silicon Valley, said in the report that Harris “is the safest pick for the donor community. She will be the pick that the California, Silicon Valley donor community — who are worried about things like tech and repatriation and taxes and so on and so forth — she is the pick that they will be happiest with.”
Harris already is scheduled to headline a “high-dollar fundraiser.”
“Harris’s special touch with the ultra-rich has been integral to her political ascent in San Francisco, where she first served as district attorney before her statewide wins as attorney general and then U.S. senator,” the report said. “Harris was a regular presence on the city’s cocktail circuit and has been profiled in society pages ever since her 30s.”
Her big-name supporters have included Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, early Facebook president Sean Parker and power brokers Reid Hoffman and John Doerr.
One constant force behind Harris has been Democratic donor Laurene Powell Jobs, the billionaire widow of the late Steve Jobs.
Her personal links to the industry also are vast. The campaign manager when she ran for DA is now at Google, and her brother-in-law, Tony West, is general counsel at Uber.
She’s also been close to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg over the years, the report said.
