Dot-Com Drew
 | |
| Era | The Nineties |
|---|---|
| Age | 28-40 |
| Home | Santa Clara, CA |
| Demographic | white, technology, libertarian |
| Lean | Lean Republican |
| Race | white |
| Successor | Startup Seth |
A software engineer at his third Santa Clara startup, paid in stock options, who reads Wired and wants the government to stay out of the internet. He votes Republican in the 1990s, unlike the technology professionals who follow him in later decades.
Who they stand for
The first internet boom is dated from the Netscape flotation in August 1995. It produced a class of technology professionals whose politics followed their industry's interests. They supported deregulation, a low capital gains tax, more visas for skilled workers and no federal control over the network. The Communications Decency Act was struck down by the Supreme Court in Reno v. ACLU in 1997. The Clipper chip and the export controls on encryption were abandoned. The capital gains tax rate was cut from 28 per cent to 20 per cent in 1997, and the cap on H-1B visas was raised twice. The industry lost the antitrust case United States v. Microsoft, filed in 1998. Drew saw the case as the government punishing a successful company.
Silicon Valley as a whole voted Democratic in the 1990s. Engineers who held stock options leaned Republican, and both parties courted them through the industry group TechNet from 1997. The Nasdaq index peaked in March 2000, and Drew's stock options fell in value with it. His successors are Startup Seth in the 2000s and Podcast Pete in the modern era. Podcast Pete is shut out of the industry and turns the same views into grievance.
Playing to them
He supports a president who leaves the internet alone. That means no law on internet content, no key escrow for encryption, a lower capital gains rate, more visas for engineers, and a Justice Department that does not intervene in the software market. He opposes any attempt to police the internet for decency, any tax that treats stock options as wages, and any antitrust suit against a company he admires. He also distrusts incumbents in general, so he is harder to hold in a second term than to win in a first. He has no interest in who marries whom. A president who adopts social conservatism in the hope of keeping him gains nothing from him and loses Castro Marty.
Winning him with a capital gains cut also wins Greenwich Chip, but it loses Madison Steph and North Philly Arlene. Winning him on skilled immigration loses Anaheim Darlene. Leaving Microsoft alone costs no one in the cast except McPherson Don, who has seen the consolidation of business from the losing side.
Where they live
The five states where Dot-Com Drew makes up the largest share of the electorate in the nineties:
- New Hampshire
- Utah
- Washington
- California
- Arizona
Lineage
Dot-Com Drew → Startup Seth → Podcast Pete
The same type of man: young, white, clever, libertarian on economics, not religious, uninterested in moral questions. What changes is whether the tech industry employs him, and where his energy goes as a result. Drew and Seth work in tech, and their politics are the industry's: deregulation, low capital gains tax, more H-1B visas. Pete does not, because H-1B hiring and diversity hiring have made it hard for a young white man to get in, and he works in sales. Drew and Seth put their energy into startups. Pete puts his into podcasts, YouTube, Twitter and crypto, and comes away with a grievance: everything is unfair on men like him. That is partly true and partly the effect of what he listens to. On economics all three are the same: low taxes, no welfare. The difference is that Pete cares about the moral and cultural questions, race, sex, gender and speech, which Drew and Seth never did, and he takes the right's side on all of them.