Nate Silver has presented an intriguing argument in his latest blog post for The New York Times that describes the huge gap in technology talent between the Democrats and Republicans. Silver looks at the contributions that technology companies such as Google and Apple have made to both political campaigns, showing that both overwhelmingly contributed money towards Obama’s re-election campaign. The President received $219,516 from Apple employees compared to Mitt Romney’s $22,719. In fact, when looking at the ten companies featured on Fortune’s "most admired companies" — which includes the likes of Amazon, Netflix, and IBM — Obama took home 83 percent of all the donations made to the two campaigns.

Silver believes that employees that donate significantly to a particular political campaign may also be willing to contribute work to it. In that case, a Democratic campaign would have a much larger talent pool to draw on — a factor that may have bolstered the Obama campaign’s internet savvy platform and data collection skills for the 2012 election. Silver concludes that while it may be a boon for the Democrats, it ultimately hurts Republicans: there would still be plenty of talented people in the technology sphere that could contribute to any GOP campaign, but the group would be much smaller compared to Democrats.