How do all techies vote? With ballots, like everyone else. Here's a better trick question. How do all young people vote? Not in local elections!
Sad, but true, and not illegal. Age and time spent living in San Francisco, which are usually related factors, are what bring people to the ballot box and unite them on issues.
So, as for those young technology workers? “I think the jury is still out as to how politically engaged the majority of new young tech workers are,” USF assistant professor of urban affairs Rachel Brahinsky tells KQED. “You may have some people who are new to the city and haven’t figured out how to plug in yet. They may be just out of college and aren’t that politicized necessarily. Some of them are. Some of them aren’t. And then if they’re getting some of these tech jobs, they are very, very busy.”
Supervisor Eric Mar disagrees, a bit, telling the Chronicle that “There’s a tendency to demonize tech workers... there’s the stereotype of how the CEO may act, but a lot of them — particularly people working for startups — may be empathetic to many of the labor issues as other progressives.”
Then, troubling the very term techie, which like the word hipster seems to lose specificity and utility which each successive use, "There’s not a variable that says ‘techie’ that we can check off,” David Latterman of quantitative research firm Fall Line Analytics added.
Getting awfully anecdotal for a man of his profession, “I know 50-year-old techies on the far left, and [others] who are staunchly conservative, and everything in between,” Latterman says. “The older they get, the more they diffuse into the city and the body politic.”
So, will we see a tech bloc or "tech vote" in the future? Another USF professor, Corey Cook, doesn't think so, necessarily. "Tech may never develop as a tech bloc vote in San Francisco," he said. "We’re trying to see if it does,"
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