SiliconBeat

During much of the election, the tech world’s attention has focused on former eBay CEO Meg Whitman and former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina in their respective gubernatorial and senate races. Both had big war chests, and both won big. Now we’ll see if they can do the same in the general election.

But there were two other valley tech candidates running last night, and both lost. Let’s take a look.

One was Josh Becker, the venture capitalist campaigning for the open seat in the Peninsula’s 21st Assembly District. I wrote about Becker’s campaign a few weeks ago. By running an Obama-like Web 2.0 style campaign, he’d dramatically outraised his opponents and galvanized the dot-com crowd in the valley:

“Becker has been using the social media strategies he learned while volunteering for Barack Obama’s campaign, including fundraising through Facebook and Twitter. Whether this will translate into more votes against his two opponents on Election Day remains to be seen.”

Well, it didn’t. Becker lost last night to Democratic establishment candidate Richard Gordon, by a margin of 37.89 percent to 33.75 percent, with Yoriko Kishimoto getting 28.36 percent. I suspect too many of those big name Internet contributors couldn’t actually vote for Becker because they didn’t live in the district. And Gordon had the backing of local party officials and unions, who are much more effective at actually getting people out to vote.

Nothing against Gordon, but it’s too bad for Becker, who seemed to have a lot of energy and ideas. I expect him to remain engaged in social issues as he has been for many years.

On the other hand, I’m not shedding any tears over the losing campaign of former Facebook executive Chris Kelly. He lost the Democratic attorney general campaign to Kamala Harris by a wide margin: 33.03 percent to 15.81 percent. That was in a crowded field of seven candidates.

Kelly poured more than $12 million into his campaign. But much of it seemed to pay for odious negative ads against Harris that filled my TV screen every night. Hard to get excited about a guy like that. Over at TechCrunch, they also wondered whether Kelly’s ties to Facebook’s privacy problems doomed his campaign.

Money aside, the losses are good reminders that trotting out Web-savvy campaigns in not a magic bullet for winning office. Sometimes, the old fashioned things like party-backing and organizing still matter, too.