“Republicans buy sneakers too.”
That quote, attributed to Michael Jordan, is a handy reminder for corporate America: alienating half your customer base in pursuit of woke political objectives is bad for business.
What happened to Disney in Florida is a cautionary tale. Go woke and you will go broke.
The Mighty Mouse has lost billions of dollars in market capitalization because many of its more conservative fans have been turned off by its social activism. Worse, because the company picked a fight with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), it lost a treasured real estate perk that has given it unrivaled control over of a huge portion of central Florida for decades.
When Ben Franklin said that you never argue with anyone who buys ink by the barrel, he was talking about taking on the media. Fighting city hall (or in this case, the governor’s mansion) is even more perilous for any business or citizen.
I once had a client who asked me to create a flow chart to help their corporate board think through when they should engage in political issues and when they shouldn’t. The conclusion: Only engage in politics if your business interests are involved.
This rule has been broken time and again in the last couple of years, mostly because those in corporate America have made the calculation that they have more to lose by sticking to their knitting than by engaging with the dangerous crosscurrents of political activism.
What happened to Disney is not unusual. Delta Air Lines lost valuable tax breaks when it protested a Georgia voting integrity bill that the left had deemed politically unacceptable. Major League Baseball made a major blunder when it pulled the All-Star game out of Atlanta over the same controversy.
Corporations all over the spectrum have been burned by contributions to a Black Lives Matter organization that has proven to corruptly use the money to buy luxurious houses for its founders.
In that aftermath of the last election, many multinational corporations that have political action committees (PACs) have refused to give to the vast majority of congressional Republicans who voted to decertify the presidential election. It’s a free country and these PACs can give to whoever they want, but not cultivating relationships with representatives who vote their districts on a political issue is short-sighted.
Republicans are slated to take control of the Congress in November, and corporations that continue down the woke path will face additional scrutiny next year from the new majority. Here are five ways these companies can course-correct before the next election:
• Make it corporate policy to only engage in issues that are important to the company’s bottom line: Stay away from the culture wars, lest you want to alienate half your customer base.
• Get off your moral high horse, especially if you do extensive business in China: nobody wants to hear how virtuous you are if you are enriching communist dictators.
• If your employees want to engage in politics, let them, on their own time: If you have a workforce morale problem because of a great political debate, by all means, give your employees the time and the space to fully exercise their constitutional rights. But that must be OK for all of your employees, not just the politically correct ones.
• Support politicians who support your industry, not the political whims of the corporate board: Giving political contributions to politicians who consistently refuse to support your industry is stupid and counterproductive. Similarly, not supporting legislators who consistently do support your industry will make them question why they support you in the first place. Align your political giving with your industry’s interests and nobody will complain.
• Do not support organizations that want to destroy the capitalist system: I am always surprised by big companies who support activist groups that call for their ultimate destruction. Whether it is BLM or Greenpeace or some other Marxist-inspired group, giving them money is not going to make them better. Indeed, it will just give them a bigger platform to make it easier for them to destroy you.
Feehery is a partner at EFB Advocacy and blogs at www.thefeeherytheory.com. He served as spokesman to former House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), as communications director to former House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas), and as a speechwriter to former House Minority Leader Bob Michel (R-Ill.).