Carly Fiorina, the former chief executive of Hewlett Packard, is failing to win the backing of Silicon Valley technology leaders.
Fiorina’s opponent Barbara Boxer has received $229,487 from computer and Internet companies, compared with $45,550 for Fiorina, according to a Bloomberg article.
Her lack of support in Silicon Valley contrasts with eBay’s former chief, Meg Whitman, who’s winning funding in her race against Jerry Brown. Whitman’s donors include Cisco chief executive John Chambers, eBay CEO Jerry Donahoe, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, Intel CEO Paul Otellini and Microsoft Corp. chief Steve Ballmer.
“Fiorina’s lack of support, even from executives such as Chambers who are known to back Republicans, may reflect misgivings about her tenure at Hewlett-Packard, which lost half its market value on her watch,” the Bloomberg article in The Chronicle reads. “It also stiffens the challenge of beating a Democrat in a Democratic state.”
I know Silicon Valley well, and it often goes Democrat: Executives such as Larry Ellison of Oracle and John Doerr of the Kleiner Perkins venture capital firm, for example. But not being able to win support from a leader such as Chambers — a longtime Republican backer — is telling.
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