Good news for Hillary Clinton: there are very few Republican voters in Silicon Valley. Bad news: the Democrats there are not Democrats as you know them. They detest trade unions, for example, and they’re very keen on immigration – so long as the immigrants have PhDs from elite Indian or Chinese universities. They are in favour of government, so long as it’s “smart” government. And they believe that all change is good – especially in the long term.

We know this courtesy of a fascinating piece of opinion polling by Gregory Ferenstein, the guy who runs TechCrunch’s policy channel. He surveyed a sample of 1,200 startup founders, executives and investors from a database of 8,500 such people in order to find out what their views were on a wide range of political and social issues. What he found was that Silicon Valley is not – as most of us had assumed – a hotbed of techno-libertarianism, but rather a colony of people who “reject the very heart of libertarianism: individualism and small government”.

Silicon Valley’s titans want government to invest in schools – but are fanatical about paying as little tax as possible

In fact, they appear to believe in big government. But it’s a government that acts as “an investor in citizens” rather than as a force that protects people from capitalism. These tech pioneers want government “to heavily fund education, encourage more active citizenship, pursue binding international trade alliances, and open borders to all immigrants”. They believe that “all change over the long run ends up being good. Likewise, they reject the notion that there are inherent conflicts of interests between citizens, the government, corporations or other nations”. The best way to solve social ills, they believe, is via “the discovery of new information”.

Not surprisingly, founders of IT startups are more liberal and wealthier than those who make tools for finance, privacy, or security; and those who have created technologies for “sharing” information (social networking etc) are “more comfortable with collectivist government policies”. This is reflected in their political donations, which go overwhelmingly to Democratic candidates (in sharp contrast to those founders of fintech and cybersecurity companies, who donate to Republicans). And in November an overwhelming majority of the Silicon Valley tech crowd will vote for Hillary Clinton.

As far as I know, this is the first serious attempt to understand how these people view the world. And the usual caveats about opinion polling – especially about value-laden issues – apply, though Mr Ferenstein is admirably open about both his data and his methodology. One could view his study merely as the landing craft for an invasion of anthropologists seeking to understand the mindset and mores of a truly exotic tribe. But he’s already done enough to prove that, if Silicon Valley’s “tech titans” are Democrats, then they are the weirdest Democrats ever to put a cross on a voting slip.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Illustration by Matt Murphy.

And they’re full of interesting contradictions. For example, they want relaxation of immigration controls because the US isn’t producing enough of the high-IQ talent they need. Similarly, they believe that government should be investing in schools, universities and infrastructure to foster homegrown talent. Yet at the same time they are absolutely fanatical about paying as little tax – federal and local – as they can get away with. They desire the ends, but decline to provide the means – by parking their profits in Irish “subsidiaries” which, as one commentator wryly observed, “have as much physical reality as a leprechaun”.

Similarly, the ethnic composition of Silicon Valley’s poster-children is appalling. In 2013 Facebook hired just seven black employees out of an overall increase of 1,200. Google’s employees are 60% white, 31% Asian, 3% Hispanic and 2% black.

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And then there’s the Valley’s gender gap. At the moment, it looks as though only 12% of engineers working in tech companies are female. This low number might just be a reflection of the level of sexual harassment prevalent in the Valley. A recent survey of 220 women working in these companies revealed that nearly two thirds had experienced unwanted sexual advances, 84% had been told they were “too aggressive” and 88% had experienced questions being directed at a male colleague that should have been addressed to them. And so on.

Just like any other male-dominated company, in fact. The days when we regarded Silicon Valley as exceptional are long gone. The truth is that it’s just weird. Mrs Clinton is welcome to it.