California’s Silicon Valley was “right leaning” in 1988. In 1992, it took a solid leftward turn, and and it has been spiraling in that direction ever since (speaking as someone who lived in Santa Clara County for most of 1977 to 2018).
I've been here from 1979 to present. I agree with your assessment - I was flabbergasted when Clinton carried this County in 1992. But in retrospect, maybe it wasn't such a bad thing that Bush the First lost.
Still, I'm not sure what happened to this area - it has just shifted more and more left over the years.
I just took it as Wheeler's 'Evil Eye' postulate. The people here have achieved such financial success, that they attempt to ward off the 'Evil Eye' of others less financially fortunate, by adopting socially liberal (i.e., communist) sympathies. Still, I'm surprised about the pervasiveness of this attitude. The people here aren't idiots, yet they ignore the well documented history of Socialist disasters and tragedies.
Two things started TRENDING in that region around 1992.
Clintons coming into town (DC) and Apples’ near bankruptcy due to Microsoft’s taking over the PC clone market.
I recall Scully from Pepsi kicking Jobs out and taking over Apple. Scully made it worse. Jobs went to start neXT which went nowhere. Scully in his idiot wisdom listened to some French idiot he hired as Exec VP that raising the Mac’s price entry point would give it the ‘aura of Cadillac’ in the micro market while branding the cheap PC Clones as crap.
Meanwhile, Taiwan ramped up production of low cost PC Clones and Gates the present day psychopath actually did something shrewd which was to include a free OS (MS-DOS) onto the clones imported for distribution. WordPerfect became the dominant word processing software for practically every legal firm in the US and was running on Gate’s MS-DOS PC Clones. In a few years Gates had 90% of the microcomputer market and Apple was left to die.
But the dirty Clintons came to the rescue of Jobs who was called back to attend to his dying Apple creation, and after giving away missile secrets to the ChiComs by staging a Loral missile crash where the guidance technology was easily seized, the ChiCom massive slave sweatshop labor force was put at the disposal of Apple while Clinton, taking a breather in between intern blowjobs in the Oval Office, let loose Summers to destroy Microsoft via an Anti-Trust shakedown. Once Gates learned to become a compliant fascist liberal progressive donor (donating massive amounts of $$$ to various slush fund money laundering foundations), Gates was allowed to continue Microsoft with instructions to lay low and pay the extortion.
Back in Silicon valley, the H1B program allowed a cultural takeover of Apple and others turning the region forever Clinton blue.
And here we are today with a nationwide Marxist CCP takedown of the US.
Computer nerds used to be libertarian. How is someone smart enough to write programs dumb enough to be liberal, or even anything other than libertarian?
I’m also in the Bay Area. I think that there a number of factors at play in the leftward shift of Silicon Valley over the last 30 years. Few remember now how closing the earliest tech companies had ties as defense contractors. The Lockheeds and Fairchilds and HPs and others were doing big business as defense contractors, and that affected the overall mindset.
Another part of it is a generational thing. Most of the first generation of that culture were born in the 1920s-40s and were veterans of WW2, Korea or Vietnam-era military service and were more conservative and patriotic. With ending of the draft in 1973, far fewer Americans are veterans and that’s become especially true of the high-end college-educated crowd from which Silicon Valley draws its ranks.
Also, university education has become harder and harder left over the past half century, and that has turned out more and more left-leaning grads.
It’s been represented by Dems in congress for decades. But it’s true that a lot of the executive leadership was Republican until the 1990s.