Letters to the Editor
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This just matches the demographics
Isn't this expected from the demographics? Latino and Asian californians voted overwhelmingly for Clinton and Silicon Valley is predominantly Latino and Asian (including a very large Indian population).
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Facebook
Yes, we all know that every Facebook user lives in Santa Clara County.
That makes total sense.
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Ah yes, but
I bet his internet popularity is helping Obama in fundraising to use in that ground support opperation. Younger educated people know how to pay online. Many older Americans don't. It is easier to pay online than to mail in a contribution.
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Demographics of Santa Clara County
The premise of your article is flawed. Santa Clara County is 25.7% Hispanic and 30.5 % Asian. Both demographics voted overwhelmingly for Clinton. The number of people who actually work at Silicon Valley companies do not a majority make.
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Ron Paul?
Maybe Ron Paul is very well-represented in Silicon Valley, and so he took the independent votes from Obama?
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Si Valley Establishment
To go along with the demographics that others have mentioned, Silicon Valley seems to be very much part of the establishment these days. Computer tech is no longer outside of the world of big business, it is part of that world. And Hillary is the establishment, business-friendly Democrat.
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@Slackie
Paul couldn't have taken the independent votes, as independents are allowed only to vote for Democrats, not Republicans, in California.
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facebook is for kids!
I can't believe that one would think that the valley would follow facebook.... I am sure he won Standford but please.
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Be Careful Farhad
Any thing seen as the least positive for Clinton is immediately suspect by Obama supporters. I'm sure the next post to pop up will say you're racist for even suggesting that the vote was even real. And of course if you argue the point, you must be a Clinton shill.
And of course, REAL democrats could NEVER vote for Clinton. There MUST of been some mistake!!! Or obviously they were Latino or Asian. How racist to think anything else!
OF COURSE, all techie people MUST support Obama. NO one at Google or anywhere on the net ever supports Clinton.
And, didn't you know, it's a plot. Clinton didn't REALLY win California! Everyone everywhere HATES her. So how could that ever be?
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Where is Silicon Valley, really?
I'm guessing that, like most San Franciscans, Farhad thinks that the world ends at Candlestick Point, and Silicon Valley is 'that place to the south'. Assuming that a high-income, well educated techie is a representative Santa Clara County voter is like saying that someone in the Marina is a typical San Franciscan!
Sure, the manufacturing base is slipping away, but in a lot of ways, San Jose is still a very blue collar town.
Obama did, in fact, win-- by a fairly wide margin-- in the 14th Congressional district, which encompasses most of the higher-income areas of North Santa Clara and South San Mateo counties, where most of the techies actually live.
Obama won Silicon Valley.
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@Farhad
Thanks for the follow-up on that; I'd heard that Paul's got a lot of techie supporters, so I thought it was perhaps possible, but there you go.
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Obama support may grow as provisional votes counted
Santa Clara still has "Semifinal Official Results" on http://www.sccgov.org/elections/results/feb2008/ which probably means they have still not completed the Provisional ballots. We were told they did not expect to be finished until Friday.
According to the Obama-campaign poll watchers, who energetically stopped by my precint three times on Tuesday, there were reports of incorrect use of Provisional ballots in Santa Clara County. They were coming by "to make sure we were doing it right".
In the Modified Closed Primary, if a Non-Partisan voter requests a Democratic ballot, we give it to them and process them as a regular voter. However, some precincts were (incorrectly) processing this situation as Provisional Voters, which delays their ballots.
With Clinton's commanding lead, it's impossible for the results to change, but the margin could get closer.
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Yes, the world is a static place
Dean's loss using nascent internet technologies in 2004 proves the internet will never be useful. How do people get jobs writing stupid stuff like that?
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Tread lightly
Thank you Farhad, as a political activist and former candidate for state office myself, I can tell you that organizing online can really lead you astray. It can give you a false sense of things. As you note, clicking is much easier than getting out and actually voting. I get very nervous when people point to online popularity of anything and extrapolate it to the real world.
Once again, thanks for suggesting cooler heads prevail.
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Santa Clara County
Farhad, how many people who work in the Valley actually live in the Valley? Lots of people who work in Santa Clara country commute to there from all over the Bay Area. The premise that "the Valley" can be treated as a voting block seems off to me.
Enough folks commute to Google that they have buses that go to Berkeley and Santa Cruz, for the love of Pete. "The Valley" works as a model for looking at businesses, but for voting? Probably not so much.
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Lawrence Lessig is endorsing Barak Obama
Lawrence Lessig, the influential law professor at Stanford Law and founder of the Creative Commons has come out in support of Barak Obama. He has laid out his reasoning in a 20 minute video on his site.
http://lessig.org/blog/2008/02/20_minutes_or_so_on_why_i_am_4.html
I don't have the link but I've heard that the Obama campaign has approached Lessig on technology policy issues. It will be interesting to see if this means anything to those nerds who keep up with the music technology debate.
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@boerby
1) I didn't say the Internet will never be useful. Where did you read that?
2) 2004 had "nascent internet technologies" -- really? (Answer, no.)
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lessthanjoey and Douglas Moran
Thanks for the simple explanations to Manjoo's "mystery" ... that was easy!
Salon - try much to create "issues" out of nothing?
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Obama & SV - from someone who has actually lived here for decades and knows the area
Santa Clara County is still majority white. Our Asian population is far from being a monolithic voting block comprising as it does well-educated engineers from India and China and also less upwardly mobile groups from Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and the Philippines. Unlike SF we have a miniscule black population in our county. Our largest city is San Jose, third largest city in California after LA and San Diego with close to a million people. We have a large population of baby boomers who are old-line partisan Democrats and who either never worked in high-tech or worked in the semiconductor biz in capacities that didn't require a college degree or a high level of technical expertise. Many of them are not computer literate and haven't traveled widely in the US never mind abroad. They're good people but suspicious of change and Hillary is definitely the Dem status quo. It's no surprise that they voted for Clinton. The Clintons are not tech savvy at all. Bill wrote his book longhand for heaven's sake and Hillary is no Al Gore. Farhad may not have lived in the Bay Area for long and certainly doesn't know that much about the valley's demographics.