*This post is part of a series on Silicon Valley's political endgame from the Ferenstein Wire. See all available chapters here.

The Republican party is not the only party experiencing a grassroots political coup. A new breed of capitalism-loving and urbanized liberals is demanding an entirely new role for the federal government.

With heavy support from Silicon Valley, these new tech Democrats want the government to embrace economic disruption, with unlimited high-skilled immigrant visas, expansive trade deals, and performance-based funding that encourages charter schools to abandon teacher unions and adopt the management model of a modern startup.

“The replacement of working-class whites with upscale professionals has turned the Democratic coalition into an alliance with a built-in class division," wrote Columbia Journalism Professor and NYT Columnist, Thomas B. Edsall, on the migration of professionals from the Republican party to the Democrats. "While constituting a minority, the relatively upscale wing clearly dominates party policy and provides the majority of the activists who run campaigns, serve as delegates to the convention and have become the core of the party’s donor base.”

As an example of their growing power, California was once Ronald Reagan territory; but now, the Democratic leadership has taken over big cities, as their base in manufacturing union towns dwindles (think of House Leader Nancy Pelosi in San Francisco, Hillary Clinton from New York, and Barack Obama from Chicago).

Scholars have documented this migration for well over a decade, but Democrats had wrongly assumed that their educated, urbanized counterparts would be just like their older Midwestern brothers. They aren't.

On nearly every major battle within the Democratic Party (high skilled immigration, Syrian military intervention, Keystone XL pipeline, and charter schools) education is the dividing line between the capitalism-loving-global-citizen Democrats and regulation-happy-America-first Democrats.

And now, thanks to a fuzzy-haired populist's rise to power, Hillary Clinton's splintered support is no longer obscuring a deeply divided party.

On most major issues, Clinton supporters are tech Democrat pure-breeds, while Bernie Sanders claims the blue-collar Occupy-Wall-Street European socialist wing.

This new tech Democratic wing is erasing the Republicans' monopoly of being the pro-business party.

The tech lobby is a far bigger fan of the Democratic Party, since the industry relies heavily on governmental support for education, research, and immigration. The communications industry has now eclipsed labor unions as one of the largest donors to liberal candidates.

As a result, on nearly every major issue, the Democratic Party leadership sides with the tech industry whenever they conflict with labor unions.

Unlike their capitalism-loving libertarian counterparts, these tech Democrats aren't rabid individualists. They want the government to encourage everyone to maximize their contribution to society by competitively funding citizens to be as educated, entrepreneurial, healthy, and civic as possible.

"The government's role is to provide a platform by which individuals and organizations can build compelling futures for themselves and for society", explains Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn and an early Barack Obama supporter.

Inspired by the popular "government as platform" mantra in Silicon Valley, I began hand-coding every single law from select members of the influential House Judiciary Committee to determine if there was a connection between this philosophy and high-skilled-dominated districts.

Democratic congressmen are much more likely to author laws that attempt to make citizens the best versions of themselves if they represent a district with a higher proportion of skilled workers (see methods section for details).



This overhaul isn't confined to the Democrats. The Tea Party contributed to a similar modernization when it started to dominate the Republican party.

Traditionally, each political party had had their fear-of-change coalition. Conservatives feared cultural disruption while liberals feared economic disruption.

“Needs for security and certainty generally yield culturally conservative but economically left-wing preferences,” explains a team of researchers in the Journal of Personal Political Psychology.

That is, psychologically, the same need for certainty that predicts anti-gay attitudes in conservatives also predicts support for wage laws and regulation in liberals.

Market regulations and the kinds of policies supported by labor unions are meant to guarantee citizens and workers some measure of predictability from the whims of the market. An influx of high-skilled labor or the availability of Uber drivers can make salaries of existing workers uncertain.

The equality-obsessed Democrats put their faith in government agencies to manage public services, and small-government-loving libertarians prefer the free market. But Silicon Valley holds a unique faith in citizens as the solution to problems. As an example, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates have given hundreds of millions dollars in support of charter schools, which are often union-less, startup-like organizations run by a local parent or community entrepreneur.

Both libertarians and these new Democrats embrace the unpredictability of competition as a worthwhile risk for potential innovation. The Democratic version is less about free market fundamentalism, and more about leveraging community resources and talents. This could be in the form of a parent run charter schools, Uber drivers replacing public transit with carpools, or scientists looking for alternative energy breakthroughs.

Hence, I've been calling this new breed of Democrats, "Civicrats" (admittedly, it's not the best name).

This conflict actually reflects a very old division within the Democratic Party.

In the 1840s, a cadre of upstart city-dwelling liberals calling themselves "Young America" split with their party elders over the role of free trade and innovation. They were the original self-identified "Progressive Democrats".

Young America forged a rare alliance between the hot tech industry of the time (railroads) and its low-tech counterpart, the agrarian South, to overhaul America's protectionist free trade stance. Railroads wanted cheap steel and farmers wanted to sell their goods abroad.

Interestingly enough, the sharing economy is once again forging a similar alliance between the entrepreneurial alliance low-skill workers and the high tech industry. Sharing economy CEOs are overwhelmingly Democratic.

The hard-charging CEO of Uber, Travis Kalanick, admitted that he’s a huge fan of the Affordable Care Act (“ObamaCare”), saying “The democratization of those types of benefits allow people to have more flexible ways to make a living.”

The mantra of the sharing economy is that citizens acting as entrepreneurs can provide much more efficient public services, whether it's replacing buses with rideshare carpools, or hotels with Airbnbs.

Inspired by these conversations and with the help of Google's Survey team, I figured out how to conduct the first representative political polls of "gig economy" workers in San Francisco. Gig economy workers have a political profile much closer to tech workers than union labor in San Francisco, in both their support for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders and their desire for high-skilled immigrants.

As the economy makes all industries more reliant on technology and entrepreneurial work, Democrats may still be the party of "labor" — but a much different kind of labor. With these changes could come an entirely new Silicon Valley approach to government.

*For links to methods section and for more stories in the series, click here.