An Unholy Alliance?
The fight for voting rights has created some unlikely partners.
By: Joey Handel and Carter
Major League Baseball has long been considered the most conservative of the major American sports leagues, a product of its audience and the ethos of traditionalism inherent to the game. So when MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred announced that the league would move the 2021 All-Star Game out of Atlanta in response to the passage of the Election Integrity Act of 2021, it was a moment to reconsider the extent to which the big business of sport has become a surprisingly influential force in politics. More specifically, the extent to which that force is now used in service of social justice and civil rights. According to Manfred’s statement, the league had “engaged in thoughtful conversations with Clubs, former and current players, the Players Association, and The Players Alliance… to listen to their views”, before deciding that the league had a responsibility to respond to the move to suppress the vote in Georgia.
Listening to debates over whether the Georgia bill, S.B. 202, amounts to a return to Jim Crow (or “Jim Eagle” as President Biden memorably called it), it is easy to lose sight of what the bill does, the reason it was created, and where it fits into the larger context of political battles that are increasingly over the notion of democracy itself. The bill changes a number of voting regulations in Georgia, but the upshot is that it makes it harder to vote across the board, specifically targeting Black people’s access to the vote, and grants more control over elections and certifications to the Republican-held legislature (ominous, given the pressure on state legislators to throw out the results of the 2020 election). We could write thousands upon thousands of words about the damaging provisions of this bill, but others have done so far more effectively than we can here. Suffice it to say that everyone interested in preserving our democratic system should oppose these efforts. As it turns out, that is a coalition that includes Major League Baseball and over 100 other major companies. Here is the unfortunate truth: winning and wielding the support of big business like MLB is one of the few realistic paths to overturning S.B. 202. Opponents of the law could rally opposition with protests and run for office on a message of opposing the bill, either convincing Republicans to reverse course or winning the power to do so. To be clear, we should absolutely be doing all of the above. And in an ideal world, that would be enough. We do not live in an ideal world. Unappealing as it might be, winning this fight will require soliciting and employing the help of big business.
It is worth considering why an undemocratic institution like the MLB choosing to oppose the bill is one of our few real hopes to restore democracy in Georgia. Put simply, despite the primacy of culture war issues in the political thicket, the economy still matters above all else. Most working people are not paying very close attention to the political conversation — they generally don’t have strong feelings on cancel culture, for example — but they do have to pay their bills and remain employed. Their scorecard for their elected officials effectively has one column. Polarization and incumbency advantage have only gotten bigger, but if voters lose confidence in your ability to manage a strong economy, your political standing will come under threat.
The 2020 election made it clearer than ever that we are living in a new political era, one of hyper-polarization. As recently as a decade ago, if the Democrats recruited the right candidate, they could remain competitive in states like Louisiana, Arkansas, and Nebraska. Today, the rigid partisanship these states have long displayed at the presidential level has trickled down-ballot to other statewide offices and state legislatures. The 2018 Senate election in Tennessee distilled this new paradigm. The Democrats recruited perhaps the best candidate possible: moderate former Democratic governor Phil Bredesen, who faced far-right (even for Tennessee) Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn in an incredibly favorable national environment to Democrats. Bredesen often emphasized to voters just how moderate he was, going so far as to say he would have voted to confirm then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh even after Kavanaugh had publically faced rape allegations. He lost by nearly 11 points.
As Tennessee demonstrates, even a strong candidate in a wave year is not enough to flip a state. So what is? The dominant story of state politics over the past few decades has been the federalization of local races, but voters deciding who they want to run their state still demonstrate far greater responsiveness to local economic concerns than they do to twists and turns in Washington. The dominant story of state politics over the past few decades has been the federalization of local races, but voters deciding who they want to run their state still demonstrate far greater responsiveness to local economic concerns than they do to twists and turns in Washington. People care about the economy, and if one party is directly responsible for its gross mismanagement (especially on the state level), they notice. The incompetence of Bobby Jindal and Sam Brownback, governors of Louisiana and Kansas respectively, both led to the election of Democrats. Jindal mishandled a budget crisis and slashed higher education funding, resulting in increased unemployment and a lower GDP than when he began his tenure. Voters rejected his would-be Republican successor by 13 points, and Democrat John Bel Edwards has led the state ever since. Sam Brownback turned his state into a right-wing economic science lab, which led to an extreme budgetary crisis and a subsequent repeal of his tax cuts by the state legislature, which was controlled by his own party. Laura Kelly won the gubernatorial race the following year. However, relying on Republican governors to drive their state’s economies into the ground is unsustainable. Putting pressure on businesses to vote with their feet when Republicans pursue anti-democratic and regressive policy goals is a far more attainable goal. There are multiple recent examples of this phenomenon playing out.
Perhaps the most well-known story is North Carolina. Signed in early 2016, H.B. 2, also known as the “bathroom bill,” discriminated against transgender people in North Carolina. Along with a public uproar, there was severe corporate backlash as a result of the bill, with some estimating that it could have cost the state as much as $630 million. Possibly the most newsworthy moment came when the NBA chose to move its All-Star game, which was scheduled to be in Charlotte that year. The music industry, too, responded severely, with dozens of artists choosing to cancel planned dates in the state. North Carolina voters watched all of this unfold in horror, and responded to the economic fallout and the hit to their state’s reputation at the ballot box. In the same election that Donald Trump won the state and Republican Senator Richard Burr was re-elected, Republican Governor Pat McCrory lost his race — a roughly 12-point swing from his 2012 victory. The bill comprised the bulk of the debate during the election, and McCrory’s loss was seen not just as a personal repudiation by the voters but also a referendum on the politics (and economics) of attacking trans people’s civil rights. The Cooper administration worked out a deal with the legislature to repeal the bill in March of 2017.
Mike Pence’s Indiana is another demonstration of the power of corporate backlash to repeal discriminatory laws. As part of a wave of “religious freedom” laws that were passed the same year the Supreme Court decided Obergefell v. Hodges, the Indiana state legislature passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The law was a much more expansive version of the legislation that was being introduced in other state houses: analyses revealed that it would allow businesses to discriminate against and deny service to LGBT people. Much as with North Carolina, professional sports was among the first to respond, with the Pacers and Fever publicly voicing their opposition in a joint statement. But Indiana politicians faced a much more immediate threat from the business community, including the tangible consequence of losing 1,000 jobs overnight, when Angie’s List canceled a planned expansion to their Indianapolis headquarters. Other businesses threatened to follow suit, and less than two weeks after the original bill was passed, Pence was sheepishly signing an addendum to the bill that clarified that it did not authorize businesses to deny service on the grounds of sexual orientation or gender identity. The Indiana example is even more hope-inspiring than the way things played out in North Carolina, with activists working with business to get a discriminatory law repealed by the same legislature and executive that enacted it. Especially in the context of regressive laws in deep-red states where there is no path to electing a Democratic replacement, the quick defeat of RFRA offers important strategic lessons for those attempting to beat back the Georgia law.
The fact that corporations are playing such a significant role in these fights is, to put it mildly, not ideal. They are the definition of an unreliable partner, prone to switch allegiances the moment they feel doing so is required for the bottom line. That’s not an indictment of their behavior, just an appraisal of their incentives. The truth is, the goals of big business very rarely align with left, or even liberal goals; more often than not, corporations are a malign force in politics and left-wing causes. Look no further than Bessemer, Alabama, where just weeks ago Amazon warehouse workers’ push to unionize failed in no small part due to such egregious tactics from the company that the NLRB might require a revote. For the most part, businesses are not opposing Brian Kemp’s actions because of altruism. Massively controversial and morally appalling bills like S.B. 202 are bad for business, and thus it is in their best interest to oppose said bills. There is no real way to keep these organizations accountable given their inherently undemocratic nature. Because they only adopt, say, socially liberal positions when it is “safe” to do so, they will never be ahead of the curve on these issues. Additionally, they can easily take advantage of moments of unified opposition to antidemocratic forces to launder their own reputation through the progressive movement. It is simply an unsustainable strategy for these corporations to play whack-a-mole with regressive Republican bills all over the country. Just as smart policymakers are already preparing for the next pandemic, so too must opponents of the Georgia voting law prepare to fight the next fight without the aid of corporations.
So how do we escape this temporary, unstable predicament? Of course, the immediate issue is a major political party that has lost its mind, so taking their keys to the car by voting them out of office everywhere is the most pressing need, and if corporations can help with that first priority then so be it. But what does a future where we can fight this fight without relying on the clout of big business look like? Sorting out an answer requires a more creative and analytical approach to addressing the fundamental causes for this quandary. First, democracy reform at the federal level can pre-empt the need for state-by-state fights over fundamental rights like the vote. H.R. 1 is on incredibly shaky ground given the lack of a majority against filibuster abolition or even reform, but if it makes it through Congress it would defang many of the Georgia law’s most dangerous provisions, and prevent other states from attempting their own S.B. 202. But it would be unwise to treat its passage as the end; the Supreme Court looms as a dark cloud over the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, and voting rights activists should be prepared for it to strike down multiple key sections of the bill in short order. That unfortunate likelihood makes it all the more important to make this a multi-front battle, so as to avoid putting all of our eggs in the basket of H.R. 1.
Taking the 10,000 foot view, reforms that serve to decrease polarization would also have an indirectly positive effect on the health of our democracy, and make state legislatures controlled by one party all the more reticent to disenfranchise their opposition. Much of the fervor to attack voting rights comes from the “existential crisis” tone of our politics, and lowering that temperature through out-of-the-box efforts that force Americans to spend time with fellow citizens who are different from them (think mandatory national service, programs that subsidize student travel, etc.) is a way to get at the root of the problem. There are no easy answers to what is, essentially, a centuries-old issue of who holds power in the state, but the scale of the problem demands ambitious solutions that shore up the rights that are under threat in the short term and dilute the power of corporations to influence political decisions in the long term.
The full picture is bleak. A political party, rapidly backsliding towards naked fascism, which retains the support of around 45 percent of the country, the geographic distribution of whom allows their party to win elections. It’s a moment of much greater jeopardy than the slim Democratic trifecta at the federal level would let on. When the political fight of the day is over basic democratic rights, winning assumes existential importance. This means finding common cause with organizations who you might otherwise consider to be malign forces within the system. Because life is about trade-offs, and in Georgia the choice is between risking the future of the democratic system and potentially laundering the reputation of some decidedly unsavory businesses. It is not poetic, but in our opinion the decision is clear. It is an all hands on deck situation for America, and that requires not just welcoming the support of CEOs who are offering it, but actively pressuring deep-pocketed corporations to get with the program.
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