How Tech Shaped This U.S. Election

This U.S. election was truly full of twists and turns — the shooting, Biden's withdrawal, the seesaw race, tech mogul Elon Musk jumping into the fray — anyone who followed the news knows all this well. But the more interesting part, for me, is that I happened to be in Boston on election day myself, so I got a taste of the atmosphere of an American election firsthand.

Friends who knew I was in the U.S. on election day kept asking whether things would turn chaotic — probably thinking back to 2020. But overall it was quite calm. On election day I visited the Harvard Kennedy School and found their cozy little election-night setup rather charming. Friends I know all used election night as an excuse to grab dinner together or throw small parties, but on the whole it didn't feel like Taiwan, where election fever seeps into every corner.

Silicon Valley's Rightward Turn — How New Tech Shaped the Race

This election had a lot to do with the tech industry. Tech shaped the course of the race in more than one way — though honestly, none of these factors are new to Taiwanese people. What surprised Americans this time around was mainly the declining influence of traditional media, the rise of YouTube, and social media's tendency to sort people into camps — none of that is new. Taiwan already saw all of it in the 2018 and 2020 elections.

Digging in a bit more, a few things stand out. First, Silicon Valley's rightward shift changed the race to some degree. The Democrats' traditional edge in media and the internet industry used to be enormous — Silicon Valley has always been liberal, Democratic home turf; just look at California as the party's stronghold. But in recent years a lot of new frictions have built up without being resolved. When I had dinner with venture capitalist friends in the Bay Area, for instance, the conversation kept coming back to taxes — many investors were afraid that if the Democrats won again, capital gains would get hit with another tax hike, so a lot of them had already grown noticeably less committed. On top of that, poor governance in California cities like San Francisco, plus the corporate and school governance problems stemming from DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) policies, left a lot of tech workers deeply unhappy with the status quo.

Unhappy as they were, though, Trump was too anti-establishment for most of them to openly back him. The turning point came when Trump was shot — that's when the Silicon Valley Trump supporters started coming out of the closet, one after another. Call this group the Silicon Valley right. They're a talkative bunch, and in the run-up to the election plenty of them went on podcasts or took to X (formerly Twitter) to blast the Democrats. Silicon Valley has no shortage of successful people, so there was no shortage of these podcast episodes either — a wave of new Silicon Valley right-wing influencers surfaced before the election, most of them firmly in Trump's camp. Back and forth, this genuinely gave Trump's campaign a real boost.

Separately, the prediction-market site Polymarket, which leaned heavily toward a Trump win, shot to fame. Its odds had repeatedly tilted toward Trump earlier than the polls did. The single largest trader on Polymarket was a French trader who became convinced early on that Trump's chances were being underestimated; he poured $45 million into bets on a Trump win and walked away with $85 million in winnings (he used multiple accounts, so the figures are estimates). This Frenchman even hired his own polling firm to run surveys. His methodology was arguably more interesting too — he asked people who their neighbors would vote for, rather than asking about their own choice, a method reportedly more accurate than asking people directly about their own voting intentions.

Polymarket is quite different from a regulated online casino — it's built on blockchain transactions. Its founder, though very young, is already a serial entrepreneur; the first version of the platform reportedly ran on a laptop sitting in his bathroom. Because placing bets was so easy, the site quickly became an alternative poll that people across the internet started citing, and that alternative poll gave Trump a noticeable edge in the later stages of the race.

So after this election, a narrative took hold that real money bet on an outcome is the most accurate poll of all — which is exactly why Taiwanese pundits bring up betting markets every election cycle. Of course, that's just one theory. In this case, the reason the betting odds tilted toward Trump so early was that a handful of super-users, like that French trader, went all-in betting on a Trump win — and in hindsight, they were right. But it only takes a few super-users to completely shift the odds and reshape the picture, so this kind of data isn't necessarily immune to distortion either.

That said, setting aside pre-election polling and looking only at election-day numbers, poll-based projections still carry a fair degree of accuracy. In fact, on election day itself, I had dinner with a friend who works in U.S. public administration, and he told me that based on mail-in ballot returns, Trump had already won — I remember thinking, "No way, voting barely even started." And apparently, very early that same day, Musk had already used his own custom-built data tool to project a Trump win. So as long as the sample size is large enough, projecting the outcome is actually fairly straightforward.

Musk Puts Up the Money and the Muscle — Trump's Best Campaigner

Beyond everything above, the single biggest tech factor in this election was, without question, Elon Musk. Not only did he donate over $100 million, he ran million-dollar lotteries in swing states, and most importantly, he threw the full weight of X behind Trump, giving Trump supporters an extremely solid home base on the platform. There's a strange twist of history here: Musk originally wanted to buy X on a whim, but after tech stocks crashed, he tried to back out of the $44 billion deal — only to be blocked by Delaware Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick, forcing the purchase through (she later blocked his pay package too). I suspect for a long stretch afterward, Musk more or less regretted the X deal — he really did overpay, and it dragged him into a lot of needless trouble. But if Musk had never bought it in the first place, he'd have had no role to play in this election at all. Talk about a setback turning into an opportunity.