Bill Bradley Makes Fund-Raising Inroads Among Rich in Silicon Valley, Wall Street
By GLENN R. SIMPSON and ANN GRIMES Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Last May, Vice President Al Gore sent videotaped remarks to a computer-industry bash sponsored by the Mayfield Fund, a California venture-capital firm that he lavishly praised for supporting innovative technologies. It was one more installment in Mr. Gore's long romance of Silicon Valley.
Then, in January, four senior Mayfield Fund partners and a spouse forked over $4,500 in contributions -- to Bill Bradley, Mr. Gore's long-shot rival for the Democratic presidential nomination. Mr. Gore's receipts from the Mayfield firm total a single $1,000 gift.
Partners at Mayfield Fund say that they make their political decisions individually, and that the firm itself is politically neutral. Still, their gifts to Mr. Bradley are a sign that Mr. Gore's hold on Silicon Valley, long considered a stronghold of his campaign coalition, may not be such a lock. It also may be an indication of how Mr. Bradley is benefiting from a new influx of Democratic donors.
Successes on Wall Street, in Midwest
Overall, Mr. Gore is still far ahead of Mr. Bradley in fund raising, with $8.9 million raised to the former New Jersey senator's $4.3 million during the first quarter of the year. Yet Mr. Bradley's showing is impressive, given Mr. Gore's advantages as the sitting vice president to a popular chief executive. In addition to his inroads in Silicon Valley, Mr. Bradley has been successful on Wall Street and in the Midwest, though not in the South.
Among the Wall Street firms to swing behind the former New York Knicks basketball star is prominent hedge fund Tiger Management LLC, whose executives and their spouses contributed about $30,000. Mr. Bradley has raised more than $31,000 from executives at J.P. Morgan & Co. and at least $20,000 from both Citigroup Inc.'s Salomon Smith Barney and Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. Mr. Bradley also had a significant lead over Mr. Gore among donors identified in federal records by terms such as "investor," "stockbroker" or "trader." Among the vice president's biggest supporters on Wall Street is Goldman, Sachs & Co., whose partners have given him a total of more than $37,000.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ Where the Big Money Comes From Total donations from the biggest political money states to the top three fund-raisers in the presidential campaign: State Al Gore George W. Bush Bill Bradley Texas $ 238,605 $3,727,362 $122,725 New York 1,386,400 151,850 920,450 California 1,050,446 414,670 461,476 Illinois 401,130 98,100 1,037,475 New Jersey 363,550 50,650 809,987 Florida 653,970 342,300 103,780 Tennessee 783,210 25,600 6,250 Washington,
D.C. Area* 1,504,997 346,700 148,000 *Includes Virginia and Maryland Source: Center for Responsive Politics data
------------------------------------------------------------------------ In Illinois, Mr. Bradley benefits from having some particularly potent fund-raising allies. They include former Chicago Bulls coach Phil Jackson and Salomon Smith Barney executive Lou Susman, a major fund-raiser for House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt of Missouri.
Another sign that Mr. Bradley is giving Mr. Gore a run for his money came last week, when Mr. Bradley collected more than $1 million at a San Francisco fundraiser heavily populated with technology-industry types. (A significant portion of those funds, however, were already counted as part of his first-quarter total.)
Not a Zero-Sum Game
Yet Mr. Bradley's fund-raising success may not be an ominous sign of deteriorating support for Mr. Gore. Instead, it may be a signal that in the competition between these two Democrats, fund raising is not the zero-sum game that experts have long perceived it to be.
For years, political professionals have assumed that the universe of potential donors is relatively static. That means candidates, to a large extent, fight their fund-raising battles by stealing donors from each other, rather than by going out and finding new players.
GOP fund-raising consultant Stanley Huckaby believes that in recent elections there has been "a Republican universe of $1,000 donors" numbering between 45,000 and 50,000 people. But the pool has grown for Democrats. Between 1992 and 1996, reports Mr. Huckaby, the number of $1,000 contributions to Democratic presidential candidates increased to 16,218 from 10,927. The universe of such contributions, he concluded, is "undefined."
That growth parallels the long and robust economic expansion over which Mr. Clinton and Mr. Gore have presided. And unlike previous booms, this expansion has generated many new millionaires -- particularly in the technology sector and on Wall Street. And many new millionaires tend, for the moment at least, to be Democrats.
John Roos, a Silicon Valley lawyer who raises funds for Mr. Bradley, says he worked with a group of political novices to organize Mr. Bradley's successful San Francisco event last week. "It was a new crowd, people who had never gotten involved in politics," he says, "and they went out and tapped a new crowd." Candidate's View on Donors
Mr. Bradley's goal is to keep finding those people. "The conventional wisdom is that there are about 400,000 people in America who can contribute a thousand dollars to a political candidate," Mr. Bradley recently said. "The reality is that the universe of people who could give at that level is closer to three million."
The development shouldn't be too surprising, says political scientist Herb Alexander, who has been studying campaign financing since the 1940s. The nouveau riche, he says, have always been generous to Democrats. In earlier eras, he notes, Democrats harvested from immigrant businessmen in the Northeast who made their fortunes in construction, or the successive waves of newly rich Hollywood moguls known as the Malibu Mafia.
But not all the money comes from self-identified Democrats. "I was a Republican until last week," says Bradley contributor Bill Davidow. "The roster of people I recruited to the dinner last week, were they registered Republicans? They were certainly people I associate with conservative thinking," including someone from the Hoover Institution and several CEOs.
Mr. Bradley's own strategizing helped a lot, says venture capitalist Ted Schlein. In 1997, the former Rhodes scholar took a guest professorship at Stanford University and spent a year hanging around Silicon Valley with venture capitalists and other technology-industry types. "He met a lot of people one-on-one during that time and took the pulse of Silicon Valley," says venture capitalist Ann Winblad.
Mr. Gore's backers say Mr. Bradley is a techie-come-lately. "I can't say where Bradley is on recent Silicon Valley issues" such as securities litigation or visas for hi-tech immigrant workers, says venture capitalist John Doerr. "What's clear is that Al Gore has been a tireless advocate for the technology community on these priority issues."
But Mr. Bradley has been particularly successful in appealing to Mr. Doerr's fellow venture capitalists, who aren't put off by long odds. Moreover, a lot of them don't talk about issues when asked why they like Mr. Bradley; as much as anything, they seem to like his style.
Dan Schnur, a Calfornia political analyst, says the technology community gravitated to Mr. Gore because "he's paid more attention to them than any other politician. But there's no real loyalty attached to that support."