Big Tech paid millions to elect Bay Area mayor in Calif. governor race. It isn’t working.

When Matt Mahan, the mayor of San Jose, jumped into the governor’s race at the end of January, he did so with ease and confidence — and with multiple millions of dollars backing him.

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Mahan was the final major Democratic candidate to throw his hat in, enlarging the pool of candidates to 11 people at the time. Some were skeptical of a run from a novice politician like Mahan, who was only elected mayor of San Jose in 2022 after just two years on the city council and at 43 was the youngest candidate in the race by a decade.

But others, particularly the tech elite in Mahan’s backyard of Silicon Valley, were ecstatic. Mahan was branded as the only moderate on a long list of Democrats, and as a candidate who had real-time experience handling public safety and housing issues in the state’s third-largest city. A Harvard grad, Mahan lived in the same dorm as Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, and the two have stayed in touch, Mahan recently confirmed to SFGATE. A column published in CalMatters described Mahan’s candidacy as a litmus test to see if left-leaning Californians were ready for a more middle-of-the-road leader.

After a week in the race, Mahan raised his first $7 million. Back to Basics, an independent expenditure committee supporting Mahan and bankrolled by tech leaders, has since collected over $15 million in contributions. Famous tech executives are among the list of backers, including Netflix CEO Reed Hastings; Michael Moritz, a venture capitalist and owner of the San Francisco Standard; and Patrick Collison, the CEO of Stripe Inc. Mahan has since continued to raise money and contributions from other committees.

But the $50 million total put into Mahan’s campaign and other associated committees to elect Mahan hasn’t gone very far. The most recent polls of the race show Mahan struggling, still unable to reach double-digits with a week until the state’s top-two primary. Two polls published in early May that were commissioned by his campaign and by Back to Basics, respectively, showed him hitting a high of just 10% support.

Confronting these realities, last week, one independent expenditure committee for Mahan, called Deliver for Mahan, filed paperwork to dissolve itself. Separately, the Back to Basics committee returned a $1 million donation to Hastings, which could signal the committee quieting its efforts. Hastings publicly disavowed that move and said last week he wanted the money to stay in the campaign and was still voting for Mahan.

“I’m voting for Matt Mahan. I didn’t ask for any refund and they shouldn’t have done it. Go Matt,” he wrote on X last Friday.

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Garry Tan, the San Francisco-based venture capitalist who has formed a political fundraising group, told Politico that supporting Mahan was “an education.” He likened the experience supporting his campaign to being in the first or second grade. “We won’t be first and second graders forever,” he said, implying he’s learned some lessons for presumably the next election cycle.

It’s unclear whether Mahan is putting the money where his mouth is. With a week until the election, some in Mahan’s corner are questioning if the appeal he has from the wealthy tech elite has turned people away from him.

Mahan isn’t the lowest-ranking Democrat; that would be former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who has maintained just about 1% of likely voter support for months now. But Mahan has consistently trailed behind former Rep. Katie Porter, as well as behind both former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra and Tom Steyer, a billionaire businessman. Becerra and Steyer remain neck-and-neck in the polls as the candidates with the best chance to make it to the general election, along with Republican Steve Hilton.