Hillary Clinton Will Likely Be As Pro-Innovation as President Obama. Here’s the Data To Prove It

There is a Grand Canyon-size gap between the enthusiasm that Silicon Valley had for Barack Obama and what tech titans currently feel towards his potential Democratic replacement, Hillary Clinton, donating just a third of what they gave in 2012 (roughly $3.3M vs. $8.8M by June of each respective election). And, even those donating millions of dollars have been quite explicit that their intention is mostly about stopping Donald Trump, while begrudgingly accepting an imperfect Democratic platform.

I’m going to make the case that the tech industry’s collective skepticism of Clinton’s pro-innovation credentials are unwarranted. There is a reasonably quantifiable way to forecast how innovation-friendly a candidate will be based on their legislative record: add up the percent of laws that a Congressman writes related to high-skilled workforce training, data transparency, and performance-based funding.

An obsession with making the federal government run more like a tech company and training citizens to work in new industries is a good sign that a policymaker will end up siding with Silicon Valley on most issues.

Indeed, there’s even a relatively obscure faction of the Democratic party, known as the “New Democrats”, that have attempted to rebrand the party since the 90s as more tech friendly. But even though many senior members, including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, have explicitly identified themselves “New Democrats”, the party has never fully escaped it’s the stereotype of being anti-business.

Despite the popular perception, Silicon Valley insiders have recognized the New Democrats and heavily supported Obama in 2008; predictably, Obama eventually backed the tech industry on virtually every conflict with labor unions, including the trans-pacific partnership free trade deal, no waiting periods to hire high skilled immigrants and funding for union-less public charter schools.

To be exceedingly clear on this post’s thesis: I argue that the percentage of bills a candidate authored in Congress related to technocratic management and skilled worker development is a reasonable predictor of their friendliness toward Silicon Valley-supported policies.

Let’s see how Clinton’s past stacks up.

What kind of Democrat is Hillary Clinton?

While Hillary Clinton may have adopted the egalitarian rhetoric of her populist primary opponent, Bernie Sanders, here is a taste of the innovation-centric bills she authored while in the Senate.

• Recruit more talented school principals (National Principal Recruitment Act)
• Modernize Veteran care technology (Veterans Disability Benefits Claims Modernization Act of 2008)
• Require the Center for Disease Control to be transparent with public data (21st Century Wellness Act).

This was very similar to the few technocratic laws that Obama authored while in the Senate.

• S. 3077 (110th): Strengthening Transparency and Accountability in Federal Spending Act of 2008
• S. 3047 (110th): Enhancing Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education Act of

This stands in sharp contrast to someone like Bernie Sanders’ record, who has spent most of his career on bills that regulated capitalism. To take just a few very recent ones:

• S. 2142: Workplace Democracy Act: making it easier to form labor unions without elections
• S. 1832: Pay Workers a Living Wage Act: $15 federal minimum wage

The debate over whether Clinton will be less innovation-friendly than Obama has been frustratingly subjective; my contacts in Silicon Valley just seem to get a bad feeling from Clinton’s populist rhetoric.

So, I decided to take a very tech industry approach to the debate and quantify how innovation-centric Clinton and Obama were as legislators.

I put full details and methods of this research project in separate addendum online and explain a bit more about the process below; suffice to say that I used a well-established technique in Political Science of categorizing laws based on keywords and concepts. After all of the tallying, I found that Democrats are rarely both supportive of New Democrat-style tech-friendly laws and also have a strong history of authoring new regulations to constrain the free market.

That is, Democrats either prioritize economic growth and better management or they prioritize regulation — but not both.

Obama and Clinton authored laws that almost exclusively focused on skill development and improved government management while in the Senate.

Why can’t a Democrat focus on both innovation and regulation?

The best possible explanation I have is that the Democratic base is actually composed of two broadly defined and distinct constituencies: urbanized highly-educated professionals and middle America blue-collar workers.

Beginning in the 1980s, there was a mass exodus of professionals, such as doctors and engineers, from Reagan’s Republican Party, when just 34% of professionals voted Democrats during Nixon’s election to over 50% in the 90s in Bill Clinton’s.

Al From, who helped create the New Democrat coalition in the 80s, told me, “With our economic growth agenda (fiscal discipline, investment in people and technology, and expanded trade), we also tapped into and built new Democratic constituencies in technology and finance.” This new base was no accident and neither was the new agenda.

20 years after Bill Clinton’s reformation, the constituency of Democrat strongly associates with the kinds of laws they author

There is an extraordinarily strong correlation between the number of economic growth oriented policies that a sample of House Democrats propose and the percentage of professional workers in their district (graph below). Just looking at the House Judiciary Committee (which is the committee that oversees technology policy), if a member of Congress has more than 50% of the voters who work in professional occupations, they’re also likely to focus exclusively on bills related to technocratic management or high-skill worker development.

A good example is someone like Congressman Jared Polis, a former tech entrepreneur himself, who represents the high-growth cities of Colorado and wrote a bill performance-based funding bill for charter schools to focus on science curriculum.

So, in some ways, the Clintons have always been the representative of this professional class of Democrat.

Fascinatingly enough, this split within the Democratic Party goes back over 150 years. The first major schism in what is now the modern Democratic party appeared in the 1840s, when upstart frontier professionals in the West teamed up with the high skilled industry of the day, Railroads, to advocate for free trade and investment in infrastructure.

This so-called “Young America” movement would eventually take over the party with the election of President James K Polk, who helped radically overhaul America’s once-isolationist free trade policy.

After the civil war shook up the Democratic party, skilled professionals would waffle between major political parties over the next century. Eventually, by the 1990s, they settled back again in their original home, housed the organization called the New Democrats.

So should Silicon Valley be optimistic for Clinton as President?

In private, a number of very wealthy former Barack Obama donors tell me that they are anxious that Clinton’s populist rhetoric portends a presidency that will not be friendly on emerging issues.

For instance, Clinton now conditionally opposes the trans-pacific partnership, spoke negatively of charter schools in front of a teacher unions rally, and made ambiguous statements on whether independent contractors in the gig economy should have to be treated like regular workers (which could be devastating to a company like Uber).

In off-the-record conversations, Clinton’s tech policy team said that her words were gravely misinterpreted and she has no plans to regulate Uber or take any positions that threaten the tech industry. Without position statements one way or the other, it’s hard to say.

But one good indication that she’ll stay loyal to her roots is how she has conceded to Bernie Sanders on one issue: higher education.

It was widely reported that Clinton appeased the populist base by proposing a free college education plan like her former opponent. But — and this is crucial — the details of her plan are about as tech-friendly as I can imagine.

Her proposal calls to create an entirely new way to fund college by incentivizing students to become entrepreneurs in distressed communities. Her plan also requires colleges to do something that many colleges have resisted: offer lower-priced versions of classes through online education. Indeed, the publication Inside Higher Ed declared that Clinton’s education plan was “giveaway to Silicon Valley”.

So, will Hillary Clinton be as good for innovation has Barack Obama? Beyond the rhetoric, It is hard to find evidence to the contrary.

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