Is Silicon Valley tilting to the right?

(Politico) In Silicon Valley, the Wild West of American industry, Republican “Young Guns” now dot the horizon.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) took a ride in Google’s driverless car this week, and he’s planning a trip to Microsoft later this spring.

Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) will be at Google’s Mountain View headquarters next week for a business roundtable with the industry trade group TechNet.

TechNet also set up West Coast fundraisers this month for Reps. Greg Walden (R-Ore.) and Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), and Sens. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) and Jerry Moran (R-Kan.).

The software developers and smartphone designers may not agree with their guests on gay marriage or abortion, but they’re anxious to protect their businesses from new taxes and regulations. Republicans say it’s a natural fit: They’re younger than their Democratic counterparts in Congress, and they’re making better use of these companies’ platforms in the political sphere. Best of all, they don’t have to tailor their business message to appeal to Silicon Valley — they oppose new government regulations across the industrial landscape.

“There is a growing realization on the part of the players in Silicon Valley, in the venture [capital] community as well as the startup community, that the Republicans in Congress, and in the House, really do represent the next generation in terms of wanting to move the country forward in innovation,” Cantor told POLITICO in an interview.

In essence, Republicans are packaging themselves as the next great innovation for Silicon Valley: a plugged-in protection force pledged to defend private enterprise. It’s part of a sustained GOP effort to position itself as the party of the future, both for the industry and for the voters who use its products.

“A lot of us came out of a small-business world and are naturally sympathetic to startup companies, to capitalism, to free enterprise, to innovation,” said Walden, who chairs the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology.

At the same time, the tech companies have been undergoing a political maturation process in which they are, for the first time, looking at Washington as a major battlefront, and stocking D.C. offices with new lobbyists — many of them Republicans — in hopes of staving off taxes and regulations.

Republicans may never turn a traditionally Democratic constituency into a Republican bastion, but there are signs that Silicon Valley is a little less blue today than it was just a couple of years ago.

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