In the case of Uber, the cities with the most to gain from innovation tend to be large and dense, and often Democratic. So at the local level, the leaders in welcoming Uber are often Democrats. Conservatives like to mock California as anti-business, but the state is one of just two to have enacted a comprehensive, statewide regulatory framework that is friendly to ride sharing. The other is Colorado, also run by Democrats.

But it’s not just about Uber and taxis. Consider state laws that prohibit auto manufacturers like Tesla from selling directly to consumers. Car dealers favor these laws, which interfere with Tesla’s direct sales model. Of 22 states that permit direct sales, 14 voted for President Obama. New York, California and Illinois all have freer markets in auto retailing than Texas. Did I mention that car dealers are a strongly Republican constituency? In 2009, the statistician Nate Silver found that 88 percent of car dealers’ political donations went to Republicans.

When it comes to business regulation, “I don’t know that there’s an ideological breakdown,” said Clark Neily, a litigator at the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public-interest law firm that opposes many kinds of business licensing. He pointed to Florida, one of just three states requiring a license to practice interior design. Republicans in the state’s House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly in 2011 to deregulate the profession, along with others like auctioneering where the need for a government license was unclear.

But under pressure from licensed interior designers, the State Senate, also held by Republicans, killed the deregulation bill on a 32-to-6 vote. Despite more than a decade of solid Republican rule, you still need a license to decorate other people’s homes in Florida, or braid their hair, or auction their property, or run a ballroom dance studio.

The Institute for Justice has also spent years fighting state laws that restrict the sale of coffins to licensed funeral directors, which protect funeral homes’ ability to control coffin sales and impose large markups on their customers. These laws have existed mostly in strongly Republican states in the South, and funeral homes have vigorously defended them in legislatures.

The institute has mostly succeeded in getting the laws thrown out, not by legislatures but by the courts; the one remaining state where you’re likely to get in trouble for selling a coffin without a license is Oklahoma, which is dominated by Republicans.

At the federal level, Republicans have spent several years hashing out the difference between being pro-business and pro-market. Many Republicans in Congress have soured on programs favored by large companies, such as the Export-Import Bank, seeing them as anticompetitive business subsidies. But as the coffin fight shows, you don’t have to own a large business to be a crony capitalist.