“I love tech,” Cruz said, kicking off his speech to the crowd and not-so subtly mentioning that both of his parents were computer programmers.
READ: Huckabee heads to Holy Land
The 2008 presidential election saw an infusion of tech with politics, and President Barack Obama’s savvy operation has widely been referenced as the precedent for harnessing data and digital models for political campaigns. Many of Silicon Valley’s biggest names — and their wallets — are considered potentially big power players in the 2016 presidential election.
–
Paul, whose political operation has started to open an office in San Francisco and has aggressively courted donors and supporters in Silicon Valley, sought to define himself as someone who can bridge people at a time of hyper-partisanship.
The Kentucky Republican noted that he got raucous applause from the audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington last year, then delivered the same speech at the University of California, Berkeley, and got a similar response.
“There is a unifying belief in personal liberty,” he said. “I think there are a lot of people who just want to be left alone.”
