This article was originally published on October 4, before Warren Buffett said he would not endorse any candidate
Warren Buffett’s house — the same one he has lived in since 1958—is famously nondescript.
The world’s sixth richest man lives in a pretty ordinary single-family home on a corner lot in suburban Omaha. A millionaire could afford it, and an oligarch or British prince would turn his nose up at it. Mr. Buffett is worth $145 billion.
What is noticeable, though, is the absence of a “blue dot” sign on the lawn out front. In the affluent neighborhood of Dundee, where Mr. Buffett lives, almost every house has a white sign outside with a circle a foot wide painted blue at its center.
The blue dot, which started as a grassroots campaign to signify support for Kamala Harris, has sprouted all over Omaha and— incredible as it seems — might just deliver her to the White House.
But Mr. Buffett, despite being a lifelong Democrat, is refusing to enter the electoral fray — to the consternation of his neighbors.
He may be 94, but every financial move of the “Oracle of Omaha” is still followed by tens of millions of Americans on a daily basis; one blue dot signaling his political support for Ms. Harris could be enough to sway the vote in this part of Nebraska.
In early September, neighbors wrote to Mr. Buffett, pleading with him to erect a blue dot outside his house. “Would you please consider placing this blue dot sign in your yard?” wrote Karen Conn, a 71-year-old grandmother who, with her husband Tim, has made hundreds of signs in her garage, adding: “We feel that it is so important to ‘do something’ for this election.”
The letter has been met with a deafening silence. While Mr. Buffett’s daughter Susie has two blue dots outside the front of her sizeable home, a five-minute drive from her father, and has even posed for photographs with them and the blue dot activists, her father has remained defiantly silent despite endorsing Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Quite why has been a mystery. It appears that his security advisors have assessed that politics has become so divisive that it’s not safe for Mr. Buffett, living in his relatively modest home (it’s currently worth $1.4 million according to some reports), to make even the token gesture of putting up a pro-Harris sign.
“It’s like putting an X on your forehead,” a source close to Mr. Buffett told The Telegraph on the issue, “Why would you do that? Why would you have a blue dot?”
Senior Democrats in Nebraska have been desperate for Mr. Buffett to endorse Ms. Harris.
Back in May, before Joe Biden pulled out, Jane Kleeb, the State Democratic Party chairman, told Bloomberg: “Anytime that the Buffetts get engaged, it signals to other donors that it’s more important to give.”
But it may be that there’s more going on. Last year, Mr. Buffett’s annual letter to shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway, the trillion-dollar conglomerate he still runs, was — as Buffett-watchers pointed out—“sharper” than usual with criticism pointed at the Biden-Harris administration over its introduction of a one percent stock buyback tax as part of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Mr. Biden had floated quadrupling it to four percent in his State of the Union address. Mr. Buffett was scathing. “When you are told that all repurchases are harmful to shareholders or to the country, or particularly beneficial to CEOs, you are listening to either an economic illiterate or a silver-tongued demagogue (characters that are not mutually exclusive),” he wrote.
Mr. Buffett didn’t name names, and he doesn’t make personal attacks.
But it’s been noted that having endorsed Mrs. Clinton and hosted a fundraiser for Barack Obama prior to his re-election, Mr. Buffett has refused to lend his named support first to Mr. Biden and now to Ms. Harris.
Mr. Buffett is clearly no fan of Donald Trump—but he has made a lot of money out of the Republican’s tax reforms, receiving a profit boost of $29 billion in 2018 as a consequence of the Trump administration’s cut in corporate tax from 35 percent to 21 percent.
The tax cut accounted for almost half that year’s profit — in what was a record year for Berkshire Hathaway. In that year’s annual letter to investors, Mr. Buffett admitted that “a large portion of our gain did not come from anything we accomplished at Berkshire.”
Only $36 billion came from Berkshire’s operations. The remaining $29 billion was delivered to us in December when Congress rewrote the US Tax Code.” Mr. Buffett, who believes in the rich paying their fair share of taxes, said at the time he would have preferred a different tax bill.
His company has also thrived during the Biden administration with the stock market soaring.
Mr. Buffett has in the past insisted he won’t vocalize any criticism he might have of presidents. “I’m not in the business of attacking any president, nor do I think I should be,” Mr. Buffett said in an interview with CNBC back in 2017 when Trump was in the White House.
It’s hard to underestimate Mr. Buffett’s pull in Omaha. Berkshire Hathaway, which owns stakes in Coca-Cola, Kraft Heinz, Bank of America, and Apple among others, is huge, with a market capitalization that tipped above the trillion-dollar mark in August. Neighbors said he still travels to work every day, albeit he stopped driving himself about two years ago.
Under Nebraska’s own system for delivering electoral college votes, each congressional district awards one vote. The state is solidly Republican except in congressional district two (CD2), where Ms. Harris — thanks in large part to the blue dot campaign — has taken a lead in the polls.
If she wins the three Rust Belt states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania but loses the Sun Belt swing states, then this one electoral college vote in Nebraska will get her to the magical 270 votes needed to win the White House. Based on current polls, it might just be her most plausible route to victory.
Back on September 6, Mrs Conn wrote her letter to Mr. Buffett and then walked the couple of blocks with her husband to deliver it and a blue dot sign. “We are disappointed a little, he hasn’t come out in support. When Barack Obama ran, he laid on a trolley bus to get people to the vote and he endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016.”
The Conns are convinced Republicans in their neighborhood, not sold on Trump, were open to influence by Mr. Buffett. “Trump is not sane,” said Mr. Conn, “They are looking for something else.”
The campaign has become a phenomenon, an explosion of dots that are impossible to miss. It started across the road from the Conns when Jason Brown, 53, a dog-loving business consultant, began tinkering in his garage, painting an old sign white and then coloring in a blue dot in the middle. It was August 19, and he showed the sign, the paint still not dried, to his wife Ruth Huebner-Brown, 58.
For a brief moment, the couple considered adding Ms. Harris’s name but decided the simplicity and mystery would be more effective. They were right. Within days, people had started knocking on the Browns’ door, trying to get one.
The Conns set up their own factory in their backyard and, between the two houses, working eight-hour days, they set up a production line knocking out 350 signs a day. Demand became so huge, the Browns outsourced the work to a commercial contractor.
A little over six weeks on, more than 8,500 signs have been distributed across this critical congressional district.
The polls show anywhere between a nine and an eleven-point lead for Ms. Harris in the district, a huge uplift.
The Democrats, sensing victory, have poured millions of dollars into securing this single electoral vote. As much as $18 million, according to the Republicans, outspending them by as much as 18-to-one.
Blue dots have gone to Mr. Brown’s head. And his feet. He wears white socks with blue dots he found on Amazon, and he and his wife wear blue, round-framed sunglasses and white, blue dot T-shirts to match. They can’t believe what they’ve started.
“It’s impossible to know what’s moved the polls, but my hunch is it is something to do with the campaign because there is so much enthusiasm for it. Enthusiasm makes for behavioral change,” says Mrs. Huebner-Brown.
Mr. Brown is fearful in some ways of what he has unleashed. Cars have driven by slowly, the occupants filming his house in what can best be described as a “menacing” manner. The Browns have installed a lot of CCTV around the property in the wake of the blue dot explosion.
Should CD2 tip the White House Ms. Harris’s way, then the couple are aware of the mother of all legal battles that could be coming Nebraska’s way and that further attention could be turned on them. The Browns don’t relish that prospect. In the meantime, they keep handing out signs.
Susie Buffett, one of three siblings who will inherit the Buffett fortune with strict instructions to give it all to charitable causes within 10 years of his death, has taken 40 signs. Two sit outside her house, and the rest have been distributed to family and friends.
A photograph showing Ms. Buffett with the Browns outside her home has been posted on the blue dot campaign group on Facebook. They would, says Mrs. Huebner-Brown, “love to see” her father erect a sign but “understand why he hasn’t.”
Across town in the office of Don Bacon, a retired Air Force brigadier-general seeking re-election as Republican congressman in the second district, the blue dots are causing him a massive headache. While we chat in his office, a supporter comes in to pick up a “Don Bacon” sign. “I am sick of looking at the blue dots,” says Paula Ashford, by way of explanation before vanishing back to her car.
The Congressman knows he has a fight on his hands. He is a Republican centrist, critical of Trump’s inflammatory remarks, including his weekend description of Ms. Harris as “mentally disabled.”
“People don’t like that here. We don’t like name-calling. There is a phrase we use—Nebraska Nice.”
But the blue dots have also brought in a ton of Democrat spending, making his re-election campaign altogether trickier. “Pound for pound,” he says, “We are the most important district in the country.” On the doorsteps, he says, he has “spoken to a lot of Harris-Bacon supporters,” who are splitting their ticket to keep Trump out.
He is close to another of Buffett’s children, Howard, who has raised money for Ukraine. Last month, Mr. Bacon traveled to the country meeting Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, and has consistently expressed his support — again in contrast to Mr. Trump’s somewhat mixed messages.
As he faces what he accepts is “a heavy lift,” you sense his relief that Mr. Buffett senior, a man he knows well enough, is staying out of the fray.