By Patrick Svitek, Austin Bureau

As his 14 years in office come to a close, Gov. Rick Perry is dramatically stepping up his outreach to those who could influence a 2016 presidential campaign that he has insisted would be the antithesis of his ill-fated bid three years ago.

Angling for a head start in what could be a crowded field for his party’s nomination, Perry is hunkering down in Austin with hundreds of influential activists, potential donors and policy experts. The aggressive foundation-laying, which is kicking into high gear this month, marks one of Perry’s most organized efforts yet to prepare for the rigors of a presidential race that vexed him in 2011.

“You cannot jump into this race at the last minute like he did last time, and that’s a fundamental lesson that he learned,” said Henry Barbour, a longtime friend of Perry who is informally advising him. “He has to demonstrate to Republican voters and donors he’s up to the task.”

On Wednesday, Perry played coy in response to a recent report on his preparations for a potential 2016 presidential campaign.

“I talk with people on a fairly regular basis, as I have for the last 22 to 24 months,” Perry said during an unrelated news conference in Austin. “Sometimes it’s border security, sometimes it’s foreign policy, sometimes it’s monetary policy.”

In reality, the extent of Perry’s outreach is only growing, with the governor summoning more than 100 people to his mansion for two dinners this week alone. The guest lists included Barbour, Tennessee Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey, Pittsburgh Steelers co-owner Larry Paul, Fort Worth mega-philanthropists Lee and Ramona Bass, San Diego real estate tycoon “Papa Doug” Manchester and Ian Brzezinski, who worked at the Pentagon under President George W. Bush.

The parade of VIPs is not just for show, according to people who have been meeting with Perry. To be competitive in 2016, they say he knows his preparations need to not only trump what he did three years ago, but also what his potential competitors are doing right now.

“I would say, based on our recent interactions, that he’s certainly in the higher tier, if not the top tier, of folks that are preparing for this, the presidential run,” said a senior Republican who has been in contact with several potential 2016 candidates.

Perry’s rationale for another shot at the White House has become boilerplate to those watching him in Austin. By his account, he was arrogant, reeling from back surgery and woefully under-prepared in 2011. If he passes on 2016, he tells audiences, it will not be because he has not done his homework.

Publicly, Perry has said he would make up his mind about running next spring. Those who have met with him recently say he seems genuinely on the fence about 2016, repeatedly volunteering that he still is thinking it through.

“It’s absolutely unclear from everything he told us whether he wants to run or not,” said Aparna Mathur, a resident scholar in economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “He was very explicit that he hasn’t decided.”

Mathur met with Perry on Tuesday morning in an office in downtown Austin, along with two other experts in income inequality, Scott Winship of the Manhattan Institute and Erin Currier of The Pew Charitable Trusts. Their discussion was not unlike many Perry has led - a few hours long, freewheeling and thorough, but informal. Afterward, Perry and the wonks walked over to the Governor’s Mansion for lunch with a broader group.

The discussion came a week after Perry hosted a similar session with seven health-care wonks including Avik Roy, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and Lanhee Chen of the Hoover Institution, who served as policy director of Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. In the coming weeks, Perry is expected to hold more briefings on topics including energy, the environment, entitlement programs, education, the economy, immigration and financial services.

“They are extremely rigorous,” Roy said of the sessions he has been in. “It’s not in any way some kind of tutorial or index card kind of thing.”

Generally overseeing the outreach is Perry senior adviser Jeff Miller, a relatively new figure in the governor’s political orbit who has been credited with rehabilitating Perry’s post-2012 image.

On domestic policy, Dallas economist Abby McCloskey has been playing a key role in setting up briefings. McCloskey, who used to work for AEI, has consulted for Americans for Economic Freedom, the dark-money group that helps coordinate some of Perry’s trips outside Texas.

On foreign policy, Perry is tapping the expertise of conservative think tanks, as well as the John Hay Initiative, a nonprofit of foreign policy and national security experts founded by former advisers to Romney. Perry has been working for close to a year with the group, which is working with other potential 2016 presidential candidates.

Beyond the policy outreach, Perry’s team is making sure he maintains ties with activists in the early-voting states, where a number of old friends are keeping a finger on the pulse of the political climate. Mike Dennehy, Perry’s top liaison in New Hampshire, said a group from the state is heading to Austin later this month.

Also on the political front, Perry’s circle is continuing to move him toward tip-top shape to compete on the debate stage that offered him his most devastating blow in 2011, when he forgot the third federal agency he would eliminate as president.

Perry has had an ongoing contract with Podium Master, which has taught public speaking to GOP officials, including George W. Bush and Colin Powell. In one-on-one consultations with its clients, the group emphasizes 60 to 70 skills it says are crucial to effective communication.

“Every individual we work with has gaps in their knowledge, even people who have been at it for a long time,” said Podium Master co-founder Jeanette Henderson, who expects to next meet with Perry in January.

One of the goals, according to those who have been talking to him, is to hone a presidential style that does not always come naturally to governors, especially as they wade into global affairs. Perry has had the chance to put the training into practice with two trips this fall that saw him deliver foreign policy speeches in Japan and London.

For all the preparations Perry is making, even some of his strongest supporters acknowledge he still has to overcome deep skepticism lingering from his last bid, particularly among donors who likely will have plenty of other options to pick from next year. Nearly half a dozen Republicans with Texas roots are thinking about running.

Then there is the question of how Perry keeps his presidential buzz going once he leaves the Governor’s Mansion in January, giving up the platform that has put him front and center on issues such as the Ebola scare in Dallas and border security. Steve Deace, an influential radio host in Iowa, said the allure of Perry’s political comeback already has started to fade in the Hawkeye State, which he visited shortly after deploying the National Guard to the border in July.

“I get nobody talking about him at all now, whereas four months ago, everybody was talking about him,” Deace said, adding that Perry should take advantage of the bully pulpit while he still has it: “You’re the governor of freaking Texas. You better be like Jerry Jones in the Governor’s Mansion.”

Looming over these challenges is Perry’s pending indictment on abuse-of-power charges, a case his backers see as politically motivated but nonetheless challenging within the context of gearing up for 2016. One Republican familiar with the fundraising network in Texas said the charges have “put a freeze” on a number of fronts for Perry, including his ability to reconnect with donors.

Shawn Steel, a Republican national committeeman from California, rejected that idea, as well as the notion Texas donors’ pockets are not deep enough for so many White House hopefuls.

“There’s always going to be that, but he still is a 14-year governor and he’s created a lot of relationships and should prevail,” said Steel, who helped raise money for Perry’s 2012 campaign. “Texas is a big state. They should be able to afford to support several candidates all at the same time.”

By Tony Romm

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.

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.

 “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.”

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.

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.

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.

“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.

 by Tim Mak

No, seriously. The Republicans now have more top-flight minority candidates than the Democrats. How did this happen?

Picture the first Democratic presidential debate next year: presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton, surrounded by a group of white men hoping to play spoiler.

Then picture the Republican presidential debate stage: two Hispanic Americans, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio; an African American, Ben Carson; and an Indian American, Bobby Jindal. Add to that Jeb Bush, a Spanish-speaking former governor with a Mexican-born wife; and Rand Paul, a senator who has made appealing to black voters a central part of his political identity.

At its highest levels, the Republican Party is building a noticeably more diverse group of talent—call it the GOP’s Rainbow Coalition.

This didn’t happen by accident. While the Republican Party’s minority-outreach programs have been mocked in years past—often since they were so at odds with GOP policies that alienated black and Hispanic voters—in the wake of 2012 drubbing at the hands of Barack Obama, the party began a concerted effort to aggressively recruit black and Hispanic candidates.

Today, the Republicans can call upon an array of minority senators, governors, and congressmen. Black Sen. Tim Scott was elected to fill out Jim DeMint’s Senate term. Black Republican members-elect include Mia Love of Utah and Will Hurd of Texas. Minority governors Susana Martinez, Nikki Haley, and Brian Sandoval all won reelection. Along with Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, that gives the GOP four people of color in charge of statehouses. The Democrats have just one, the governor-elect of Hawaii.

It’s a far cry from 2010 and the height of the Tea Party insurgency, when the GOP relied heavily on a single figure to speak to minorities: African-American Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele.

That’s because previous minority outreach in the Republican Party had been “nothing more than a cocktail party and a photo op,” Steele told The Daily Beast. Attitudes within the party were essentially unchanged; they just put new faces on an old, melanin-deprived product. Steele said that’s starting to change, at least a bit. “You now have a growing number of candidates and elected officials who can do that without having to fall into that trap.”

But so far, minority candidates aren’t translating into minority votes. Exit-polling data from the midterms show that Democrats won the support of 90 percent of black Americans, 63 percent of Hispanic Americans, and 49 percent of Asian Americans, even with midterm turnout that is favorable toward Republicans.

And in South Carolina, Sen. Scott received just 10 percent of the black vote.

“Do not misread this election to think that black folks are falling over themselves to support Republicans because we picked up a few black votes here and there,” Steele said. “it’s an opening, but it is not at all dispositive of success. There’s a lot more work to be done.”

The work began in earnest after Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign loss in 2012, when the GOP was faced with a choice. It could have doubled down on white candidates and white voters, or it could start reaching out to Latinos, Asian American and black voters—and recruited individuals who these voters could relate to.

In the post-2012 Republican autopsy report commissioned by the RNC, the authors stressed the need to be “actively engaging women and minorities” in their candidate recruitment efforts.

“We put an emphasis on recruiting candidates because we need to get younger, and we need to get more diverse,” RNC spokesman Jason Chung said.

At the time, those words were viewed as just diversity happy talk. But then something funny happened: The GOP actually began to recruit black and Hispanic candidates. When DeMint retired, just months after Romney’s loss, Gov. Haley turned to a popular congressman in the midst of just his second term, Tim Scott, to be his successor.

Utah’s Mia Love spoke at the 2012 Republican National Convention, before losing her House race that year by just 800 votes. The Republican-led legislature oversaw state redistricting just the year before—prompting charges of gerrymandering from state Democrats—but it wasn’t enough for her to eke out a win. When Democratic incumbent Rep. Jim Matheson opted not to run again, Love won by several thousand votes in the 2014 midterms.

And Asian-American Republican Michelle Park Steel won election this month as Orange County supervisor, a bright point in the party’s explicit efforts to elect minority candidates in the Golden State.

Her husband, Shawn Steel, a Republican National Committeeman and the former chairman of the California GOP, has been working on recruiting and promoting minority candidates for years.

“It’s quite subtle, but it’s becoming more clear every day,” Steel said. “We’ve got a young, diverse talent pool, and I’m looking very seriously at Sandoval or Susana Martinez as vice-presidential material.”

Thinking inside the conservative movement is also changing, slowly, on the topic of race. Not long ago, the concept of diversity was viewed as anti-meritocratic—even harmful. It was associated with government heavy-handedness and viewed with disdain. Now it’s viewed by a growing segment of conservatives as integral.

“In the Republican Party, when you heard the word diversity a few years ago, it meant affirmative action, quotas. That to this day is something that is unacceptable to most conservatives,” said Steel, the California GOP national committeeman. “Today, the meaning for Republicans has changed—[it means] an inclusion of people from different backgrounds.”

Republicans argue that they have a different spin on diversity, however. Sen. Ted Cruz, one of two Hispanic Republicans in the Senate, accused Democrats of “pigeonholing” minority candidates.

“They have a very difficult time running statewide, where you have to appeal to more than one ethnic or racial slice—you’ve got to appeal to a big tent, and the Democratic Party has such an unfortunate history of pigeonholing candidates that it has proven very difficult for Hispanic candidates... to appeal statewide,” Cruz said.

Roland Martin, a prominent black newscaster and Daily Beast contributor, disagrees, saying minority Cabinet members aren’t typically governors—or even national politicians. And though Republicans are racking up minority leaders at the national level, it continues to face a fundamental obstacle.

“The GOP still has a basic problem: Its policies aren’t building a diverse electorate,” Martin said.

Both Republican policies and offensive statements made by some GOP politicians have had a hand in this. Immigration activists argue that the Republican Party is alienating Hispanic voters by not allowing comprehensive immigration reform to pass. And some House Republicans supported speeding up the deportations of Central American minors who arrived alone in the United States.

Sen. Rand Paul has also been frank in arguing that Republican efforts to restrict voting rights and toughen drug laws alienate minority voters.

Then there are the outrageous remarks. Take Rep. Steve King’s claim that for every undocumented immigrant valedictorian, there are 100 who have “calves the size of cantaloupes” due to drug smuggling across the border. House Speaker John Boehner condemned the remark, but the damage was done.

And there was broad Republican support for Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy over the issue of federal land-grazing rights, which quickly turned into backpedalling after the rancher wondered if black Americans would be better off as slaves.

Even when GOP minority candidates get elected, they get attacked for being less than genuinely black or Hispanic because of their political beliefs. Democrats argue that a real member of these groups wouldn’t represent a party that operated so totally against their interests.

Cruz, for one, has been the subject of such jabs. Former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson said that Cruz shouldn’t “be defined as a Hispanic.”

Cruz, who certainly considers himself Hispanic, had fighting words in response.

“I’m always amused at people who set themselves up as the arbiters of ethnicity. I would be amused to see if they would have had the same view when my father arrived in Austin, Texas, in 1957 at the age of 18, not speaking a word of English, having been imprisoned and tortured and coming here seeking the American dream,” Cruz said on Election Night.

Mere minutes later, Cruz delivered a speech at the victory party for Texas Governor-elect Greg Abbott, who won 44 percent of the Hispanic vote. 

“One of the reasons I’m a Republican is that we treat people as individuals. When I ran for Senate, I didn’t run saying, ‘Vote for the Hispanic guy,’” he told The Daily Beast. “I ran saying, ‘Vote for a proven conservative’… who also happens to be the son of an immigrant who came from Cuba with nothing, not speaking English, seeking the American dream. And that’s the right relationship, I think.”