AMERICA’S technology sector celebrated when Barack Obama was first elected president in 2008. Mr Obama, who made savvy use of the internet during his campaign, brought a detailed technology agenda to the White House. He earned the support of industry heavyweights like Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, and Chris Hughes, a Facebook co-founder, and promised to appoint the country’s first chief technology officer.
Silicon Valley’s relationship with president-elect Donald Trump is a good deal less cosy. Mr Trump, who is said not to use a personal computer, has railed against giants like Amazon and Apple, and has promised to cut the country’s H-1B visa programme, a source of skilled workers for the sector. He has criticised the “terrible” National Institutes of Health, America’s largest science-funding agency, and is expected to cut research funding for NASA. More than 100 tech founders and investors signed an open letter in July denouncing the future president as a “disaster for innovation”.
Mr Trump’s testy relationship with the tech industry reflects a growing divide between the Republican Party and America’s most advanced industries. In counties that favoured Democratic presidential candidates between 2000 and 2016, employment in high-tech industries grew by over 35%. In Republican-leaning counties, such employment actually fell by 37%. Today, there are more than three times as many high-tech industry workers in places that voted for Hillary Clinton as there are in those that favoured Mr Trump.
The uneven distribution of tech talent can be explained in part by job growth in historically liberal places like San Francisco and Seattle. However, changing voting patterns in formerly conservative places like Houston, Dallas, and Fairfax County, Virginia account for most of the shift. In 2000, 36 of the 100 counties with the highest number of tech industry workers voted for the Republican Party. By 2016, this figure had fallen to just 19. If Mr Trump’s proposals are implemented that number is likely to fall even further.