Whitman and Fiorina, Candidacies That Did Not Compute | Hacker News Reader

Whitman and Fiorina, Candidacies That Did Not Compute

nytimes.com

16 pointsJ3L240415 comments

What's odd is that they didn't even win more than other Republicans in Silicon Valley itself, let alone elsewhere in the state. If you look at the numbers for Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, they did no better than non-tech Republicans (30-35%).

I don't think they're good examples of how a "silicon valley candidate" would do, though. They were both candidates who were popular in the business world but didn't resonate in Silicon Valley at all; Fiorina was actually actively unpopular with engineers. So you can't necessarily draw conclusions from this result to how a candidate that SV saw as one of its own would be perform.

I was a bit surprised by the demographics. I knew Fiorina was unpopular locally over the way she ran HP, but thought she ran a much better campaign than Boxer and that she would do rather better outside the Bay Area than she did - but I wouldn't be surprised if she ran again.

Conversely, I thought Valley folk might overlook Whitman's (reputedly) abrasive personality in favor of a fairly successful tenure at eBay, although her campaign was a disaster on wheels from the start. Spending $140 million of your own cash only to be decisively rejected...ouch. For that much she could have just bought Somalia or something, their entire budget last year was about $11m.

I think Whitman might've done better in the Bay Area if she hadn't tacked as much to the social-conservative right in the Republican primary (or had successfully backed away from that in the general election). Supporting Proposition 8 probably cost her a few points in the region just by itself. On the other hand, not supporting it probably would've sunk her in the primary.

I wonder why she ran with the Republicans at all. She could have run as an independent; plenty of California voters are equally annoyed with both parties' poor legislative and administrative record.

I agree; an independent would probably do well here. It's hard for someone to get through the Republican primary without destroying their chances in the general election.

California likes pro-environment, socially moderate to liberal candidates. Conservative economic and fiscal positions wouldn't be a handicap if you could avoid pandering to oil companies and anti-immigrant and religious zealots.

Good point. She was one of the rare candidates who can actually afford to take on the two parties as an independent.

Third-party candidates can't have Presidential ambitions. Not being a major-party candidate would hamstring her credibility in a national campaign.

Ross Perot made a reasonable fist of it; the only major obstacle is money. Of course, an independent candidate won't have the political network necessary for effective governance, but even that could be spun into an asset; if she had won the governor's spot and performed with reasonable competence that would have sold better than any partisan merit badge.

I don't think that getting heavily defeated at the polls outspending your opponent ~5:1 and changing positions repeatedly is much good for her national credibility either.

Whitman's very candidacy was an insult to those of us who have gone out of our way on many occasions to discharge our civic duty of voting. I'm sorry, Meg, you don't just wake up one morning, having never participated in the political process, and say "hey, you know what, I'm so great, I should be governor". It was an exercise in ego from the get-go, and thank the gods that the voters saw through it.

BTW I'm no Jerry Brown fan either. The candidate I would actually have liked to vote for was Tom Campbell. Had Whitman not blown him out of the primary, maybe I could have.

The biggest problem with these candidacies is that they did not follow the valley way. Ebay and HP didn't spring up overnight driven by a huge ad budget. They solved problems real people had starting small and growing as they delivered. Neither of them had the experience of winning a spot on the city council. The tech industry unlike Hollywood doesn't lend themselves to being a household name. It's easy for an actor to launch a political career because they are already well known to the public.

Those candidacies are the quintessential VC fueled hype company. Whitman probably wouldn't give a fresh startup $140 million in the seed round and expect them to use it wisely, so why would anyone expect a different outcome?

It has nothing to do with the Valley and everything to do with how the campaign was grown.

Oddly, maybe Whitman would have done better if she had started later. She was running commercials every single break for months before Brown even started advertising- I think people literally got tired of her being on TV all the time.

Repeating the text of her then-current advert verbatim during the debate didn't help either; she came across as very scripted. I wonder if it was her campaign or her own preference to keep the media at arm's length? I've heard her speak before and she struck me as pretty personable, and I didn't expect her to be so stiff and formal during the election campaign. Her last ad had the line 'I'll treat you [the voters] like grown-ups,' which is how you speak to a ten year old.

I'd rather like if Brown would hire her as his business adviser or something, because she had a few good economic ideas, like reducing the cost of business registration and suchlike. But that's probably not happening, they don't seem to like each other much.

Frankly, I consider it a "win" for all of us that people who try and buy political seats from their own cash fail.

I don't know what it is but I find it deeply unsettling when the likes of Jon Corzine pump so much of their own money into these things, particularly when they're former business types.

You have to expect that if they're putting in $60+ million of their own money they expect to get that back at some point.

I think it's pure ego that drives someone to spend $160M to win the governorship. It's a luxury, not an investment.

Totally agree, it's very heartening. Stevin Levit has done some research that shows that political spending doesn't have much effect at all in races that aren't super close. http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/mccain-the-...

Bloomberg spent over $100mm just to get re-elected to his third-term as mayor. Most likely he would have won if he had spent $10mm. In the end, having that $100 million wouldn't have effected his lifestyle one bit, so why not?

Were it not the case that contemporary politicians essentially can't win without spending millions of dollars, I'd agree with you hands down.

But as it is, either they're billionaires that fund themselves, or they get funded by Wall Street, Telecoms, Big Oil, Tech, Defense Industry, other billionaires, etc.

I think I'm more comfortable with a billionaire spending his own money, than a non-billionaire completely in the pocket of some particular industry.

At least with the former, the payoff they're looking for could alternately be fame, love, legacy, or simply because being in government is the one thing they haven't done yet (besides maybe going to space).

With the latter, the payoff will certainly be shaping the laws in their favor, sometimes at the expense of the country or overall economy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com