Mega investors, crypto and tech bros: Why Vance and Harris’s San Francisco ties hold the key to the election

Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox Get our free Inside Washington email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. This race probably wouldn’t even be Harris versus Trump were it not for another San Francisco legend, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who reportedly was instrumental in getting Joe Biden out. San Francisco is a “petri dish for bright, adventurous people," according to Bay Area real estate developer Mark Buell, a Democratic donor who served as one of Harris’s earliest political patrons. Trump, meanwhile, has recently been speaking apocalyptically about the “plunder, rape, and slaughter” of American cities, claiming in the last 15 years, San Francisco went from “the best city” to “barely liveable.” Harris, in turn, hasn’t been afraid to bust out some San Francisco-style jabs at her opponents, comparing Trump to the "predators… fraudsters… and cheaters" that she once put behind bars, and ridiculing her GOP rivals as "weird", a far cry from the magnanimous Obama style or Joe Biden’s throwback bipartisanship. He wrote a book criticizing multiculturalism and in 2009 famously declared that he didn’t believe “freedom and democracy are compatible.” In the last decade, Big Tech and San Francisco have started to sour on each other, pushing some Silicon Valley elites toward the GOP Since then, the PayPal co-founder donated to support Trump in 2016 and funded conservative candidates’ senate campaigns.