Tech Donors Back San Jose Mayor Mahan for Governor With $35 Million

Silicon Valley has found its preferred candidate for California's 2026 governor's race, and it is betting heavily on him. Tech donors have committed up to $35 million to support San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan's bid to succeed term-limited Governor Gavin Newsom, mobilizing a coalition of billionaires and venture capitalists whose combined spending could reshape the dynamics of the June primary. The problem, for now, is that voters have barely noticed.

Mahan entered the race as a late entrant but moved fast on fundraising, pulling in $7 million in his first week as a declared candidate. Campaign filings with the California Fair Political Practices Commission showed $2.1 million of that total came from 47 donors, the overwhelming majority of them tied to Silicon Valley's tech and venture capital world. Google co-founder Sergey Brin, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, venture capitalist and San Francisco Standard founder Michael Moritz and his wife Harriet Heyman, former Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt, Riot Games co-founder Marc Merrill, and crypto billionaire Chris Larsen all maxed out direct contributions at $78,400 each. In March, Paul Buchheit, the Gmail creator who coined Google's "Don't be evil" motto, added more than $1 million to the California Back to Basics Committee, the independent expenditure PAC operating on Mahan's behalf. That committee had already spent $1.5 million on a Super Bowl advertisement, a signal of how seriously his backers are taking the race.

The Govern for California Network, a statewide special interest group largely funded by Bay Area venture capitalists, separately donated $300,000 directly to Mahan's campaign. Joe Lonsdale, a Palantir co-founder who later launched the conservative Cicero Institute, is among donors with ties to Peter Thiel's extended network.

What the tech class wants from a Governor Mahan is not subtle. Donors and campaign surrogates have emphasized his record on housing approvals, public safety, and homelessness in San Jose, issues where they argue California's progressive establishment has failed. Mahan himself, a former CEO of Brigade Media, a civic-engagement technology startup, leans into his business-world credibility and calls himself a results-first moderate in a field he characterizes as too ideologically rigid to deliver outcomes.

The gap between that pitch and his current standing in the electorate is stark. A polling aggregator tracking 32 surveys through April 7 placed Mahan at just 4 percent, tied with former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and well behind Republican commentator Steve Hilton at 16.1 percent, Republican Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco at 14.8 percent, Congressman Eric Swalwell at 12.1 percent, and billionaire Tom Steyer at 10.5 percent. An Emerson College poll of 1,000 voters put him at 3.4 percent. The selection of Mahan for a USC-organized debate drew criticism because his high fundraising numbers compensated for his weak poll standing, a formula that explicitly priced democratic legitimacy against donor firepower.

The historical parallel is uncomfortable for his backers. In the 2018 Democratic primary, business-aligned donors poured money into Antonio Villaraigosa's campaign as an alternative to Newsom, and lost decisively. Now Villaraigosa is competing in the same 2026 field that Mahan is trying to break into, and the tech community has again chosen the candidate it views as safest on regulation, taxation, and deregulation over the candidates with deeper political bases.

With the June 2 primary less than two months away and advertising spending from better-polling competitors intensifying, the central question surrounding Mahan's candidacy has shifted from whether Silicon Valley can fund a governor's race to whether $35 million can actually manufacture one.