The Senate Democrats’ campaign arm is mixing politics with technology this week, putting on a fundraising conference featuring top executives from Google, Facebook, Microsoft and other Silicon Valley companies on Thursday. Many of these executives have already contributed handsomely to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

On Friday morning in Menlo Park, Calif., the execs will be on on a panel explaining to Democrats where innovative jobs are being created, according to the event invitation. Hours later, the Democrats will be giving the tech-focused crowd an update on the 2012 Senatorial elections over lunch.

The DSCC sent out an updated invitation yesterday highlighting “recently confirmed panelists,” including Elliot Schrage, the VP of Global Communications, Marketing and Public Policy at Facebook, Dan’l Lewin, a corporate VP at Microsoft, and David Drummond, senior VP at Google.

Another panelist is venture capitalist John Doerr of KPCB, who was appointed by President Obama to be on his Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Executives from LegalZoom, ShopKick, Bloom Energy, Yelp and Symantec will also be speaking.

Many of these executives have also been big supporters of the DSCC. Doerr gave $40,400 to the committee in 2009 and 2010. John W. Thompson, Symantec’s board chairman, gave $30,400 in 2010, the maximum annual donation that year, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics. Drummond sent $10,000 to the committee in 2009. Schrage and K.R. Sridhar, of Bloom Energy, a fuel-cell company, have contributed in smaller amounts.

President Obama also tapped Silicon Valley for cash recently, holding a $35,800-per-couple fundraiser there in late September.

The conference kicks off on Thursday, where the night seems to be more about mingling than the “innovation ecosystem.” A reception and dinner will feature eight senators, including special deficit panel committee co-chair Patty Murray, D-Wash., Democratic caucus vice chair Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Mark Warner, D-Va., who is a former venture capitalist himself and has held tech-focused events before (like this fundraiser with Google’s former CEO and this meetup in Chicago). The special guest speaker that night is liberal economist and former Clinton Labor secretary Robert Reich.

The senators may be listening for clues to how they can use social media and mobile applications for their own campaigns, as two other panels are titled “How Social Media Has Empowered Movements and Change” and “The Application Revolution/Mobile Internet.”

12 conference tickets cost $30,800, the maximum annual contribution to party committees for the 2012 election, yet one ticket is a mere $1,000. Political Action Committees can give $5,000 or $15,000 for two tickets.

Contributions to Democratic congressional candidates from the tech community have waned compared to Republicans, although some of that decrease can likely be explained by the fact that there are far more Republicans in office now than in 2010. So far this year, Republican candidates have received about $1.1 million from the computer and Internet sectors, compared to about $800,000 to Democrats. However, in 2010, donations to Democrats trounced Republicans by over 60 percent, according to data tabulated by CRP.

The same is true for money from the venture capital sector. Donations are evenly spread between liberals and conservatives this year while Democrats raised more than double the funds that Republicans did in 2010, according to CRP.

Yet, the DSCC appears to be in slightly better shape than Democratic candidates. The party committee has taken in about $380,000 from the computer and Internet sectors this year, compared to $255,000 given to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Last year, the DSCC received $1.7 million from the sector, compared to $1.1 for the NRSC.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D., Nev., is scheduled to be in California fundraising this Thursday at the Oakland offices of BrightSource Energy — a solar energy firm that earlier this year secured $1.37 billion in conditional federal loan guarantees to build a massive solar energy complex in Ivanpah, near the California-Nevada border, a project applauded by the Senator.

Hosting the breakfast event are  Brightsource Energy’s CEO, John Woolard, and the chairman of PG&E Corporation, Peter Darbee. PG&E will be a major consumer of the electricity generated by the new project, with the first plant expected to go on-line in 2012. Woolard and other company executives have given a total of $6,000 to Sen. Reid since 2009 and PG&E’s PAC has given $2,000.

When the U.S. Department of Energy announced the federal loan guarantees in February, Reid lauded the project, saying, “I look forward to BrightSource and other solar companies putting more Nevadans to work by building major projects like this in Nevada very soon.”

And at the August 2009 Energy Summit 2.0 Roundtable Discussion led by Reid and the Center for American Progress Action Fund, Woolard praised the Senator, saying that on the subject of solar energy he had “done a very good job of listening and understanding what some of these challenges are,” and then went on to describe the Ivanpah project as a jobs creator primarily for people from Clark County, Nevada.

The 400 megawatt solar complex, which when complete will be the world’s largest solar energy project, according to the company, will use mirrors to capture the sun’s power on 3,600 acres of federal land managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM). In addition to the loan guarantees, the project is considered a “fast track” priority for receiving federal stimulus dollars under the  American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). BrightSource Energy is also receiving funding from Google.org and BP Alternative Energy among other groups.

Brightsource reported paying $100,000 in the first half of the year hiring  McBee Consulting to “monitor” the loan guarantee program and the ARRA program for the company, according to federal lobbying records. Also on hire for a reported $40,000 was the firm R&R Partners, which represented the firm on stimulus issues. Both lobbyists for the firm, Michael Pieper and Victoria S. Napier, formerly worked for the State of Nevada.

BrightSource also benefits from a Nevada deal with Coyote Springs Land Company, whose chairman, Harvey Whittemore, is a Nevada lobbyist fixture and reportedly close to Reid. Under the deal, BrightSource is leasing land from the company, which already has secured necessary permits from federal agencies, and hopes to provide up to 960 megawatts of solar thermal energy for customers in California and Nevada.

Reid is a staunch proponent of the alternative energy industry, a group which has shown a huge leap in campaign contributions and lobbying spending these past two election cycles, but still is dwarfed by the spending by the older and more entrenched oil and gas industry, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Reid has received  more campaign cash–$66,000–from the alternative energy industry this election cycle than any other lawmaker. In March, the Solar Energy Industries Association named him “Solar Champion of the Year.”

Reid faces a tough campaign this November against Republican Sharron Angle, who according to recent polling is running neck-and-neck with the Senator, despite her also suffering from high negative reactions among voters.

Keenan Steiner contributed to this report.

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Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) will be fundraising at an “evening of discussion” tonight at the Hotel Monaco headlined by Google CEO Eric Schmidt, according to reports in both The Hill and the National Journal. (See the invitation here.) Other featured speakers will be Norman Augustine, former chairman of Lockheed Martin, and Martin Neil Baily, a senior economics fellow at the Brookings Institution.

The topic is “The Road to the Future: A Strategy of Growth and Competitiveness,” and the cost to attend is anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000. Warner, who is not up for reelection until 2014, is collecting the money for a joint fundraising that benefits both his campaign committee, Friends of Mark Warner, and his leadership PAC, Forward Together. Lockheed Martin ranks third among his top lifetime donors. (Linked to wrong Sen. Warner; however, Schmidt gave $2,300 to Sen. Mark Warner in October 2008.)