Democrats have lost Silicon Valley. Here’s what it will take to win it back

Democrats have long been the party of innovation.

John F. Kennedy promised the moon. Bill Clinton and Al Gore embraced the internet revolution. Barack Obama saw technology as a force that could improve lives and modernize government. 

When HealthCare.gov failed, Obama didn’t declare war on technologists. He brought them in to fix it.

That relationship between Democrats and Silicon Valley reflected a shared worldview: optimism about the future, belief in progress and confidence that innovation could expand prosperity and solve problems.

After the 2016 presidential election, much of the Democratic Party establishment stopped seeing the tech sector as a strategic American advantage and started treating it as a political enemy. What began as a backlash against Facebook over its role in Hillary Clinton’s loss metastasized into a broader hostility toward the entire industry, including founders, venture capital, startups, crypto, artificial intelligence and even the idea of technological disruption.

Silicon Valley noticed.

You can see it now in the growing number of founders and investors who no longer feel politically at home in the Democratic Party. Many simply concluded that Democrats still wanted tech money but no longer respected tech expertise, ambition or success.

The tech industry didn’t suddenly become conservative. Democrats stopped sounding like the party of innovation.

During the Obama years, the relationship looked very different. The White House actively recruited technologists into government. Obama met regularly with tech leaders. His administration launched the U.S. Digital Service, modernized federal technology systems and treated Silicon Valley as a partner in American competitiveness.

By contrast, the Biden administration often approached the tech sector with suspicion. Meetings with industry leaders became politically fraught or often never took place. Government officials worried more about activist criticism than about understanding the technologies reshaping the economy.

Democrats increasingly adopted a style of politics that many in Silicon Valley experienced as reflexively anti-innovation. Venture capital became suspect. Crypto became a moral scandal instead of something to regulate responsibly.

AI conversations often started from fear rather than opportunity. Antitrust became less about consumer harm and more about punishing size.

America is entering the most important technological transformation since the internet. AI, robotics, defense tech, energy innovation and biotech will shape economic and geopolitical power for decades. 

Yet Democrats increasingly position themselves as the coalition most uncomfortable with technological disruption. The irony is that Democratic voters remain pro-technology. Americans love the products Silicon Valley builds and use them every day.

They want innovation to improve healthcare, transportation, education and government services. Their concerns about Big Tech don’t translate into broad anti-tech sentiment.

But many Democratic elites fell into what I call the “techlash trap,” blaming technology companies for political failures while abandoning the optimism that once made Democrats the party of the future.

Politically it has been a disaster. Democrats alienated founders, investors, engineers and many younger voters. Anti-tech populism didn’t align with what ordinary voters were demanding.

The most successful parts of the Biden administration actually pointed in the opposite direction.

The CHIPS and Science Act — which steered government grants and tax breaks to the semiconductor industry — succeeded because the administration partnered closely with industry experts and private-sector talent. 

Defense innovation initiatives succeeded because they worked with startups and technologists.  Industrial policy worked best when the government treated innovation as an asset to harness rather than a threat to contain. 

That’s the lesson Democrats should take forward. The future of the Democratic Party should not be anti-tech populism. It should be pro-innovation progressivism: encouraging competition, protecting consumers and ensuring American technological leadership while still embracing guardrails where necessary.

Silicon Valley understands something the Democratic Party increasingly forgets: Innovation is messy, disruptive and occasionally arrogant. Yet it is absolutely essential to American prosperity and success.

If Democrats want to become the party of the future again, they need to stop treating the people building the future like political enemies.