Republican presidential prospects like Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio have tapped the tech industry’s fat wallets and mined its big-data expertise — but these 2016 hopefuls couldn’t be further from Silicon Valley when it comes to policy.

A series of major divides — from the fate of net neutrality to the future of surveillance reform — still splits this trio of prominent pols from Internet giants in the country’s tech heartland, which helped catapult President Barack Obama to well-funded victories in 2008 and 2012.


Web companies, for example, are pressing the Federal Communications Commission for new rules that would require Internet providers to treat all online traffic equally. But Cruz, Paul and Rubio are anything but neutral on net neutrality — they hate it, much less any government regulation at all.

Republicans also have a rift with the tech industry over domestic spying. More than a year of work by tech leaders like Facebook and Google to curtail the National Security Agency’s surveillance authorities failed this month in part because Rubio joined Paul, usually a supporter, in voting against it. And tech executives who have clamored for more high-skilled workers have heard only criticism lately from most Republicans, who slammed Obama after he issued an executive order on immigration reform.

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Even the GOP acknowledges it has plenty of work to do to woo Silicon Valley. “If you look historically at who people donate to, it’s really been 9 or 10 to 1, Democrat to Republican — we haven’t done as well,” said Paul, who has been working to set up a new West Coast outpost.

But the senator stressed the GOP still has plenty to offer, especially on tax issues that matter to tech titans’ bottom lines. “Republicans are actually going to try to do something to help the economy,” he said.

Technology companies represent some of the most successful firms in the country, and their executives form the ranks of the nation’s richest. That means there’s plenty of campaign cash for candidates to milk — and Democrats long have dominated that well. Beyond money, Democrats also have outpaced Republicans in attracting the sort of tech talent required to run modern, data-intensive campaigns.

Obama in his first presidential campaign formed powerful alliances at companies like Google, and his team by 2012 had set up an entire apparatus — Technology 4 Obama — to solicit donations from the likes of Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. Entering the 2014 midterms, Democrats again returned repeatedly to Silicon Valley and San Francisco for a series of high-dollar fundraisers. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Sam Altman, the leader of Y Combinator, for example, hosted the president earlier this year; so did Mark Pincus, who founded Zynga.

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“We’re talking about some very deep pockets here,” said Larry Gerston, a professor focusing on U.S. public policy at San Jose State University. “They’re just figuring out that money can buy them things they never imagined.”

But, Gerston added, “For all their efforts, certainly, Republican tech types and folks close to the Republican Party haven’t managed well.”

The poor political odds have only spurred the GOP to action. Paul this summer began work to set up a technology hub of sorts in San Francisco — and the Kentucky senator returned there in October for a fundraiser alongside other prominent Senate Republicans. Cisco CEO John Chambers helped host the event at the Woodside, California, home of Oracle’s Larry Ellison. These tech hardware players — and others, like new Oracle co-CEO Safra Catz and HP CEO Meg Whitman, who unsuccessfully ran for governor in California — long have backed and funded Republican candidates.

“He’s hopeful it’s a libertarian incubator of future Ayn Rands,” said Shawn Steel, a past chairman of the California Republican Party, when asked about Paul’s strategy. But even Steel acknowledged that many Internet company executives are “deeply in the infrastructure of progressive Democrats.”

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Rubio, meanwhile, has tried to align himself with businesses — speaking, for example, at Uber’s Beltway headquarters about the threat of government regulation to ride-sharing apps and other tech disrupters. The Florida senator has also spoken at Google’s Washington office about immigration, and he’s paid a visit to 1776, D.C.’s start-up incubator.

And Cruz has ported his firebrand conservative style to tech: The Texas Republican traveled this month down to a start-up hub in Austin, where he plopped a rotary telephone down on a podium in a heated diatribe against what he called the FCC’s archaic approach to the Internet.

For many Republicans, their biggest challenge might have nothing to do with tech policy — and everything to do with culture. | AP Photo

Both senators declined to be interviewed for this story.

For all their efforts, though, there’s still a widening policy gap between national Republicans and the Internet giants they’re trying to court.

Companies like Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Yelp — through their Washington trade group, the Internet Association — are public backers of net neutrality. They together have praised Obama for endorsing an approach that might subject the Internet to utility-like regulation. All three Republicans, however, rejected the president’s suggestion. Rubio hammered it as “government regulation of the Internet” that “threatens to restrict Internet growth and increase costs on Internet users.” And Cruz lambasted net neutrality as “Obamacare for the Internet” in a tweet that went viral — and drew plenty of criticism.

A high-stakes vote over the future of the NSA further tested Republicans’ relationships in the Valley. Paul and others had supported a major overhaul of the agency’s authorities to collect Americans’ communications in bulk — but the senator shocked tech giants and civil-liberties groups when he pulled support at the last minute, as the so-called USA Freedom Act reached the Senate floor for a key procedural vote. Cruz did support the measure; Rubio long had stated his opposition, citing emerging terrorist threats and the need for more intelligence.

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And for all the talk about the tech set’s need for more high-skilled workers, all three Republican stalwarts slammed Obama last week for acting on his own to advance immigration reform. Cruz and Paul previously voted against an immigration bill that tech companies had backed.

To hear Paul tell it, the party hasn’t hurt its standing among the tech crowd. He and others, for example, have backed high-skilled labor reforms in the past. The GOP senator also stressed that support for net neutrality is “not actually uniform throughout Silicon Valley.”

Paul further defended his vote on surveillance reform, stressing in an interview he “couldn’t vote for it because it reauthorized the PATRIOT Act” — a law he described as “heinous.” And in doing so, the senator appeared to take an indirect shot at his colleague, Rubio: Paul said the only gap between his party and tech companies might involve “Republicans who believe in vast and overwhelming government surveillance.” Without naming anyone, Paul continued: “I don’t think they have much in common at all.”

Republican insiders also assure that the party still has plenty to offer Silicon Valley, especially on business issues — like lowering the taxes that companies pay when they return profits from overseas.

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“The parties have raised substantial resources [in the Valley], both parties have substantial allies, and both parties have been appreciated on some issues and less so on others,” said Bruce Mehlman, the leader of the Technology CEO Council and a former top tech adviser during the George W. Bush administration.

“Republicans have been better on tax; Republicans have [been] better on trade; Democrats have been better on research funding and STEM education,” Mehlman continued. “Both historically have been good on high-skilled immigration, but it’s stuck right now. … As a result, the tech industry has always been, and remains to be, a jump ball as a political constituency.”

For many Republicans, though, their biggest challenge might have nothing to do with tech policy — and everything to do with culture.

When national Republicans have opposed gay marriage, fought climate change and taken conservative stands on hot-button social issues — the topics that tend to resonate in California — they’ve created a divide with the very Valley tech executives they might be trying to attract. That schism in part prompted Google, Yahoo and Yelp to depart the conservative-leaning American Legislative Exchange Council earlier this year. The group, comprised of state legislators and top companies, had lobbied extensively against renewable-energy mandates.

A community of Web entrepreneurs have come to realize that if “it doesn’t fit with our employees, it doesn’t fit with our customers, it doesn’t fit with who we are,” Gerston said.

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