Silicon Valley spent $25 million on a California governor candidate. He is polling at 4 per cent
Silicon Valley poured $25 million into Matt Mahan’s bid for California governor. He’s stuck at 4 percent in the polls with the primary weeks away.
Silicon Valley’s latest experiment in buying Sacramento just hit the wall. Despite more than $25 million from tech titans like Sergey Brin, Reed Hastings, and Steve Huffman, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan is polling at 4 percent barely a month before California’s June 2 primary.
The independent expenditure committee California Back to Basics has burned through nearly $20 million on ads, including a $1.5 million Super Bowl spot, yet Mahan remains tied with former Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa at the bottom of a crowded 61-candidate field. A late April SurveyUSA poll showed Steve Hilton at 20 percent, Tom Steyer at 18 percent, and Xavier Becerra at 10 percent. Mahan’s path to the top-two runoff is a statistical footnote.
This isn’t a failure of messaging alone. Mahan’s résumé was engineered for disruption: Harvard classmate of Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of the early Facebook app Causes that reached 186 million users, co-founder of the civic startup Brigade backed by Sean Parker. He entered the race on January 29 and quickly pulled in $14 million directly, second only to Steyer’s self-funded $147 million war chest. Yet capital that reliably buys market share has not purchased voter allegiance at the expected velocity.
The broader campaign is clear. Tech donors are simultaneously funding opposition to a November 2026 ballot measure that would slap a one-time 5 percent tax on billionaires’ wealth to pay for healthcare, food aid, and schools. Sponsors have already gathered 1.6 million signatures, nearly double the 874,641 needed. A proposed $500 million endowment called California Renewal, backed by Y Combinator alumni including former CEO Michael Seibel, aims to create a permanent counterweight to unions and progressive ballot initiatives. Mahan positioned himself as the Democrat willing to “challenge the establishment within my own party to demand better results.”
The pattern repeats. Meg Whitman burned $178 million in 2010 and still lost by 13 points. Venture capitalists are hedging bets, with Joe Lonsdale and Brin also donating to Hilton. Regulatory optionality, not ideology, drives the checks. What stands out is the sheer scale of the single-candidate wager and how quickly the burn rate, roughly $5 million per month, has produced almost no lift in the polls.
California’s Democratic supermajority, powerful public-sector unions, and voters’ taste for progressive measures have so far proven immune to the product-management theory of politics. The tech industry can install executives in federal agencies and cancel thousands of contracts in Washington, but Sacramento operates on a different operating system. The primary will reveal whether $25 million can force an exception.
Original reporting: The Next Web.
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