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I don't know about VCs, but I think that the shift of tech executives toward Trump has another major cause besides just that he looks like he might win. The idea that it's driven by some sort of awareness that Trump is a heavy favorite to win doesn't make sense to me because to me it's pretty clear that, prediction market weirdness aside, the race is still a toss-up. There is no actual good evidence in favor of the theory that Trump is running away with it.
So what is the other cause for the shift? I think it's pretty simple actually. Most tech executives come from the kind of blue tribe middle/upper-middle class family and cultural backgrounds where either voting Democrat is just what one does, because "it is the right thing to do" (I don't believe that, but people in those cultures do)... or, at least, the idea of voting for a Trump seems beyond the pale. One might vote for a Romney, but not a Trump. Being in the middle/upper-middle class does not grant people any sort of special degree of interest in or understanding of politics. Indeed, most such people are politically pretty apathetic. They feel that they are doing the right thing for the world by voting for the Democrats or for moderate Republicans once every couple of years and they don't think much about politics otherwise except maybe to occasionally grumble about some particular blatant excess like the WMDs-in-Iraq clusterfuck. They are the kind of people who think that the New York Times and the Washington Post are paragons of journalism and trust that writers like Stephen Jay Gould and Jared Diamond have given them a good understanding of anthropology. They are repelled by the Republican political umbrella's religious conservatism, its talk about Judeo-Christian values, its adulation of traditional family structures, its reflexive worship of the military, and many other things. As, to some extent, am I for that matter... and I myself would never vote for a Republican, if it was not for my belief that somehow, the Democrats have become even worse.
They are not stupid people, indeed many of them are brilliant, but a person's intelligence is usually not evenly distributed among different areas of understanding. It is at least as common for someone to be brilliant in one field and mediocre or even actually unperceptive in others as it is for a person to be smart all across the board. Take tech, for example. I have met many good coders who have very little interest in politics, have not thought very deeply about it, and do not have anything particularly interesting to say about it. The typical white collar professional knows very little about history and is not particularly interested in it. When he is done at work for the day, he does not spend hours thinking and reading about politics, he goes home and puts on Netflix.
Understandably, if one grows up in a background like this, spends most of one's time in college and the business world around other people who came from such a background, and spends most of one's energy focusing on business decisions and technology instead of on politics, it might take one a long time to come to the conclusion that maybe the Democrats are actually not on the right side of history any more than the Republicans are. Even when they begin to pressure you to use your company to censor their political opponents. Even when you realize that a large fraction of their rank-and-file voters automatically despise you simply because you have made a lot of money. Even when their policies make the cities where you live dirty and poorly policed. And it might especially take one a long time when the only alternative to those Democrats isn't a safe Romney type of figure, but is instead Trump and his whole gang of rabble-rousers.
I think it is notable that two of the most prominent anti-Democrat tech businessmen, Musk and Thiel, both spent time in South Africa. I do not know to what extent that experience shaped their political attitudes, but I doubt it is a coincidence that they share in common some experience having grown up not just in nice blue tribe suburbs in the West, but also in a country that has experienced a lot of devastation from racial animosity, crime, and corrupt political patronage systems.
Not exactly. One might publicly flirt with the idea of voting for a Romney, before deciding to go ahead and vote for the Democrat after all.
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In an interesting coincidence, the owner of the LA Times, who caused such a controversy by telling his editorial board not to endorse any candidate for president, was also born and raised in South Africa.
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