(WND) The lack of confidence many influential Democrats have in Joe Biden’s presidential campaign is illustrated in a behind-the-scenes effort by Silicon Valley billionaires to shore up the presumptive nominee’s digital campaigning.
“Because the Biden campaign is the Biden campaign, what we are doing on the independent side matters a hell of a lot more than it would previously, one Democratic operative told the website Recode.
Recode reported the billionaires are funding “everything from nerdy political science experiments to divisive partisan news sites to rivalrous attempts to overhaul the party’s beleaguered data file.”
The pandemic has forced campaigns to focus on data mining and influencer marketing, Recode noted, which play to the strengths of the tech titans.
Recode said there are four billionaires who have the most ambitious plans, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt…
But the tech titans clearly believe the party’s efforts are insufficient.
“For far too long right-wing media has dominated our discourse and Facebook news feeds,” Tara McGowan, the founder of Acronym, a political group backed by Powell Jobs and Hoffman, told Recode. “We can’t sit by another cycle and watch a one-sided battle play out online.”
