Barack Obama vacuums up tech-industry money

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Try Googling Barack Obama and you’ll no doubt find plenty of details about campaign money.

As it turns out, a surprisingly large chunk came from Google’s own workers.

A Times review of campaign donations for an article to appear in Tuesday’s paper shows that Google employees in California gave $562,000 to Obama. That is more than any other private employer’s workforce in California, the state that provided Obama with $84 million, far more than any other state.

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt has served as an informal advisor to the Obama campaign and campaigned on his behalf but told the Wall Street Journal that ‘Google is officially neutral’ in the presidential race. That didn’t stop Google employees in California from contributing to Obama’s election effort.

Here’s a cool campaign-contribution database by The Times that shows the top employers of California contributors. Click on a company for a breakdown by individual contribution.

After Google, the next largest source of private workers’ money from California was Kaiser Permanente, at $246,000.

Nationally, Google workers placed a close second to Microsoft employees -- so close in fact that they could demand a recount and perhaps come out on top.

Google employees nationally donated $727,000 to Obama, while Microsoft employees donated slightly less than $730,000, according to the review conducted by Times Researcher Maloy Moore and data analyst Sandra Poindexter.

Of course, Microsoft has far more workers, 90,000 to Google’s roughly 20,000.

Obama’s third largest source of money nationally came from Wall Street in the form of Goldman Sachs, $627,000.

John McCain’s largest corporate giver nationally was Citigroup, whose employees donated $223,500.

He didn’t do well with tech firms. Nationally, the Republican, who has said he doesn’t e-mail or use the Internet much, collected $20,000 from Google employees and $65,000 from Microsoft’s crew.

Obama raised more than $640 million in the campaign, to $335 million for McCain. McCain’s total includes the $84 million he took in public financing. Obama rejected the restrictions that came with taking the federal money.

--Dan Morain