Pete Buttigieg made more than a few jaws drop last week when he released quarterly donation tallies that outperformed his place in the opinion polls by a large margin. Between April and July, Buttigieg raised a staggering $25 million from nearly 300,000 donors—more than any other candidate in the race, including consistent frontrunner Joe Biden and small-donor machine Bernie Sanders. Although Buttigieg continues to poll respectably, he rarely cracks double-digits. (He currently hovers between 4 and 8 percent in recent polls.) The large haul will allow him to expand his operations to more parts of the country and invest in building a stronger campaign infrastructure in key early primary states.

As The New York Times observed shortly after Buttigieg posted his haul, his fundraising success owes something to his omnivorous approach. Some candidates, like Biden, have focused almost exclusively on big-ticket donors, while others, like Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have focused on a broad base of donors who give in smaller amounts. Buttigieg has welcomed them all, though his dollars-per-donor numbers are much closer to Biden’s than to those of Sanders and Warren, suggesting a more significant reliance on wealthy backers. “We take an ‘all of the above’ fundraising strategy from one dollar online donations, donations made through social media, all the way up to max contributions and having people raise money on our behalf,” a campaign aide told Yahoo, on the condition of anonymity.

Those numbers are backed up by the fact that Buttigieg has also become the toast of campaign contribution bundlers—and not just those with ties to the last two Democratic presidential nominees. Donors on Wall Street and, particularly, in Silicon Valley, appear to favor the South Bend, Indiana mayor more than both Biden and California native Kamala Harris. The question is why—what does Big Tech expect from Mayor Pete?



To some extent, Buttigieg’s growing popularity with the tech sector stems from his growing popularity with white, educated, and affluent voters. Buttigieg is polling reasonably well, despite not resonating at all with many voters of color. For big donors wary of the party’s turn to the left—and of Warren’s and Sanders’s promises to change the regulatory environment—Buttigieg is an exciting new candidate. At 37, he’s also one who has a long career ahead of him regardless of how this primary shakes out: For business elites, getting in early with a politician can pay off in the long-run. Finally, with Biden’s support appearing to be relatively soft, Mayor Pete also represents the presidential primaries equivalent of a “safety school.” If the former vice president falters, or if his campaign continues to resemble a never-ending apology tour, donors are investing in contingency candidates, and right now that means Buttigieg and Harris.



But Buttigieg’s connections to Silicon Valley also run deep. At Harvard at the same time as Mark Zuckerberg, he befriended two of the Facebook founder’s roommates—former New Republic owner Chris Hughes and Joe Green—and became Facebook user number 287. When Zuckerberg went on his (attempted) image-bolstering road trip in 2017, he knocked on Buttigieg’s door. The two drove around Indiana together. “I’m here with my friend, Pete Buttigieg, who’s the mayor here,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook Live post. “One of the youngest mayors in America.”