Amy Walter, the esteemed political analyst at the Cook Political Report, has taken a whack at explaining the corporate response to finding that Democrats win elections in the areas where big firms make their money while Republicans hang on to power by winning thinly populated, economically marginal expanses of land.
Walter outlines the increasingly gaping divides:
The Democratic Party is now anchored in the nation's booming, but highly unequal, metro areas, while the GOP relies on aging and economically stagnant manufacturing-reliant rural and exurban communities," Brookings Institute analysts Mark Munro and Jacob Whiton wrote in September of 2019. "The concentration of more than 70% of the nation's professional and digital services economy in the territory of one party would seem to register an almost unsustainable degree of polarization."
Just 12 years ago, according to this excellent analysis by the Wall Street Journal's Dante Chinni and Aaron Zitner, Democratic-held and Republican-held CDs produced about an equal percentage of the country's GDP. By 2019, however, Democratic-held districts produced about two-thirds of the nation's economic output. How did this happen? For the last decade, Democrats have been steadily losing ground in small-town and rural America while also making inroads into fast-growing and formerly GOP-held metro areas in and around places like Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, and of course, Atlanta.
So, today, we have corporations like Coca-Cola and Delta Airlines in Georgia at least making feints at supporting measures -- including especially LGBTQ+ and voting rights for all -- that Democratic populations care about. Their management (and work force) adopt city values; the corporations find profit in following.
... the decision by many companies to take a stand on key social issues is something that is driven more by employee input than anything else.
A 2016 survey taken of major corporations by the Public Affairs Council found that a majority (60 percent) “experienced rising stakeholder pressure to get engaged in social issues such as discrimination, sustainability, human rights and education." Leading the push for engagement within these companies: senior management and employees. According to the survey, 78 percent of the companies said senior management were the most influential in deciding whether to get involved on a social issue, followed by employees at 70 percent.
About half (51 percent) said the customers drove their decisions and nearly one-third (36 percent) said that shareholders played a role. Corporations, it seems, are indeed people.
In other words, even big companies who have a very politically diverse customer base (Republicans and Democrats watch baseball, fly on airplanes etc.), also have an employee base that's primarily centered in blue metros. And that employee base expects its employer to live up to these blue metro values.
At present, many corporations even seem willing not to throw a hissy fit about Joe Biden's slightly higher corporate tax proposals in order to keep internal peace. This development isn't everything, but it isn't nothing and needs to be pushed as far as possible.
• • •
Judd Legum chases down all the ins and outs of who is throwing around money in politics at Popular Information, an invaluable journalistic resource.
No comments:
Post a Comment