COLUMBUS, Ohio – No longer a favorite pastime for just one side of the political aisle, it’s now becoming increasingly fashionable for Republicans to be skeptical of or even beat up on big business.
And Ohio is no exception, whether it’s in Columbus or among a crop of GOP politicians who hope to go to Washington.
Bernie Moreno, a Cleveland luxury car dealer running for the U.S. Senate, has taken a pledge to accept no corporate PAC money, a stance many progressive Democrats have adopted in recent years, saying it frees him from corporate influence.
Taking a much more confrontational approach is JD Vance, a Republican who’s proposed punishing businesses that outsource jobs, or businesses and non-profit organizations that promote what he says are harmful left-of-center social ideas, by raising their taxes.
“We can’t keep pretending that corporations are our friend, and we can’t keep giving them handouts. We can’t treat them with special kid gloves. We need to go after them,” Vance said in a May podcast interview with Steve Bannon, ex-President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager.
And while the confrontation is less direct in Columbus, Republican state lawmakers recently have crossed the business community by pushing to ban employer vaccine mandates. They’ve also pursued socially conservative legislation that business leaders have said turns off the LGBTQ-friendly younger adults they want to keep in the Ohio workforce.
The trend means business groups no longer view some Republicans as a reliable source of support, and vice-versa.
“As the new CEO in the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, I’m noticing this new phenomenon of populist Republicans and socialist Democrats who are very anti-business,” said Steve Stivers, a former Republican congressman from suburban Columbus who quit office to take his current job earlier this year. “It’s a concerning trend, not just for who’s our next U.S. Senator, but for legislation in Washington and Columbus.”
A major national battleground in the estrangement between big business and Republicans this year has been over voting rights. In Georgia, Republican state lawmakers in April passed new restrictions after former President Donald Trump said he narrowly lost the state because of fraud, a claim rejected by courts and disputed by Republicans who ran the election there. Trump’s broader false claims about the 2020 election have been rejected by his own justice and homeland security departments, some top Republicans and dozens of state and federal courts.
Republican state lawmakers in Georgia originally considered ending mail-in voting, but ended up passing new restrictions that create a voting framework similar to Ohio’s, although notably giving Republican lawmakers greater ability to control local elections administration in a state that’s been trending Democratic.
The voting changes drew opposition from two major Georgia employers, Coca-Cola and Delta, and also prompted Major League Baseball to move its July All-Star Game from Atlanta in response to pressure from advocacy groups.
A national coalition of major companies, including General Motors, Netflix and Starbucks, in April signed on to a national statement opposing “any discriminatory legislation or measures that restrict or prevent any eligible voter from having an equal and fair opportunity to cast a ballot,” while not mentioning any particular state.
Republican leaders in Georgia fought back. Gov. Brian Kemp held a news conference denouncing MLB, while state lawmakers even passed a bill stripping Delta of a lucrative tax break, although the bill hasn’t made it into law. Georgia Republicans previously targeted the tax break after Delta canceled a fare discount for National Rifle Association members in 2018 following the school shooting in Parkland, Fla.
In Ohio, lobbying from business leaders over voting changes largely remained behind the scenes. Although they initially signaled concerns over talks that Republican lawmakers were taking up a voting bill, they have remained supportive or neutral on the resulting proposal from state Reps. Bill Seitz and Sharon Ray, which leaves ballot boxes intact while limiting them compared to last year’s election, and notably allowing voters to newly request absentee ballots online. House Republicans have introduced another elections bill with more severe restrictions, including ending no-fault mail-in voting, but it lacks the same level of influential support.
Elsewhere, business leaders in Ohio have been at odds with Republican lawmakers over LGBTQ issues. Business groups for years have failed to persuade lawmakers to pass a law that would extend civil rights protections to LGBTQ Ohioans. Hospitals and health-insurance companies also in June failed to convince Republican Gov. Mike DeWine to veto language from a state budget bill that would allow health-care providers to deny services if doing so would violate their religious or moral principles, which advocates said could allow someone to deny treatment to LGBTQ people.
Dozens of companies – although none headquartered in Ohio – this year signed on to a statement organized by the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy group, opposing laws banning transgender student athletes from competing in girls sports. After Ohio Republican lawmakers amended the transgender ban language into an unrelated bill in June, DeWine said he opposed the bill, although he declined to say whether he’d veto it if it made it to his desk.
State Rep. Brian Stewart, a Pickaway County Republican who criticized Major League Baseball in April for pulling the All-Star game from Georgia and called on his fellow Republicans to oppose future requests for stadium funding, said there is an increased skepticism from his fellow Republicans in the legislature toward requests from business groups.
Stewart said Republicans want to remain business-friendly, making economic development a priority.
But, he said, “I think it’s an undercurrent you can sense in our caucus that we’re not going to be taken for granted, when it comes to every business priority, if they’re going to be actively hostile towards a lot of what we believe in.”
Most recently in Columbus, Republican lawmakers and business groups have been at odds over the response to the coronavirus, including vaccines. Last week, a House committee reconvened from its summer break to hold a raucous hearing on House Bill 248, which would ban mandates for all vaccines – including once common diseases like polio and mumps – amid a larger fight over whether businesses can mandate coronavirus vaccines for their employees, or require them of their customers.
A past hearing for the bill notoriously included testimony from a physician from Middleburg Heights, falsely claiming that vaccines cause Ohioans to become magnetized and “interface” with 5G cell-phone towers.
After allowing the single hearing, House Speaker Bob Cupp, a Lima Republican, said he would pause the bill “while we work with the chairman, the bill’s sponsor, and all interested parties on this important issue.”
Business groups, including the Greater Cleveland Partnership, the Ohio Business Roundtable and the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, have reiterated their opposition to the bill, calling it heavy-handed government overreach.
Under Stivers’ leadership, the Ohio Chamber has said it will try to expand its political action committee, increasing its funding and giving money to “pro-business” Republicans and Democrats.
“This is not a partisan thing at all, because there’s plenty of Republicans who are too populist that don’t want to support business in Ohio,” Stivers told Columbus Business First. “And there’s some Democrats that are too progressive that don’t support business. But there is a pretty big group in the middle still, I think, that generally rules Ohio. We need to make sure we grow that group of pro-business Democrats and pro-business Republicans.”
David Pepper, former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party, said Republicans increasingly have adopted extreme positions on social issues and voting rights that he said harms Ohio’s economic environment by driving away younger residents. While he said he welcomes business groups’ opposition to the vaccine bill, he also said they share the blame by backing Republicans who have pursued these policies.
“Now I don’t expect business leaders to become party-line Democrats, although some are becoming that,” he added. “But I think the current extremism of the Republican Party stems a lot from gerrymandering, which is terrible long-term business economics for everyone.”
State Sen. Andrew Brenner, a Delaware County Republican, who in July sponsored an amendment barring schools from imposing coronavirus vaccine mandates, although the restriction was effectively nullified last week after the FDA gave full approval to the Pfizer vaccine, said there is a balancing act Republicans must perform between individual rights and business interests.
“I think that ultimately, we’re pro-business. We’re for lower taxes, fewer regulations. But I also don’t want to see stuff forced upon people,” Brenner said. “And I think this pandemic has opened up a kind of libertarian-ish box. I don’t know how else to put it.”
As opposed to a quieter tension in Columbus, though, Vance, in the U.S. Senate race, has advocated for the political equivalent of open warfare.
Vance made a call to arms in a May speech at the Claremont Institute, a conservative California think tank, that was a stark departure from traditional Republicans’ hands-off approach to business. He proposed raising taxes on businesses that outsource jobs, and on “woke” businesses and nonprofits that back left-of-center social ideas. He also called for workplace lawsuits against companies that give anti-racism training to employees. The speech later drew praise from Bannon, who’s styled himself as a populist leader on the political right, and who’s attempted to position himself as a power broker in Ohio’s Republican U.S. Senate primary.
“If you are fighting the American nation-state, if you are fighting the values and virtues that make this country great, the conservative movement should be nothing about if not reducing your power and if necessary, destroying you,” Vance, whose campaign declined to make him available for an interview, said during the speech.
Vance’s approach has drawn attacks from Josh Mandel, the former state treasurer and fellow Republican U.S. Senate candidate, who’s competing for a similar lane in the race. Mandel described Vance’s philosophy in a typical sound bite fashion, telling The Dispatch, a national conservative outlet, in May: “Sounds like a big government solution – not a conservative one.” Mandel told the publication he supports a more limited approach to going after Big Tech — by eliminating online liability protections for Facebook and other social-media platforms which many conservatives view as being biased against them.
Mandel also has bashed Vance over a pro-Vance PAC’s accepting of a $10 million donation from former PayPal founder Peter Thiel, a well-known Silicon Valley figure, although Axios reported Mandel reached out to Thiel requesting a meeting earlier in the campaign.
In an interview, Moreno said his no corporate PAC money pledge allows him to remain independent from special interests, which he said appeals to Republican voters. As a business owner, Moreno said it’s disturbed him to see more businesses openly dabble in political issues, turning off portions of their customer base.
“A lot of my opponents say this business is bad, and that business is bad, but they take their money,” Moreno said. “What do they expect? They want an investment return. I don’t want to be beholden to any business.”
Stivers, who flirted with running for the U.S. Senate this year before taking the Chamber of Commerce job, said in a recent interview that business leaders largely have been unhappy with their prospects in Ohio’s U.S. Senate field. He said Vance has stood out to him especially.
“Are there legitimate market power conversations that need to be had about some of these tech companies and the power that they have? Probably,” Stivers said. “Should there be conversations about splitting them up, and pursuing anti-trust types of things? Maybe. But he’s actually going much more broadly than just going after Big Tech. I’ve seen some quotes from him that are very anti-corporate. It’s a very populist way of thinking about the world, and if it’s wrong when the left does it, it’s wrong when the right does it too.”
Vivek Ramaswamy, a Cincinnati entrepreneur who also briefly considered running for the U.S. Senate as a Republican earlier this year, has made the rounds recently plugging his book, “Woke Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam.” In the book, he argues that large corporations in recent years increasingly have sought to influence political and social issues, co-opting left-of-center stances on social-justice issues, allowing them to deflect attention on the left — and stave off possible regulation — away from questionable business practices, like their operations in China.
Along with the influence social-media companies like Facebook and Twitter have gained over political debate through their enormously popular platforms, Ramaswamy argues big companies have entrenched political power and are undermining democratic debate.
“If you’re Coca-Cola, you’d rather talk about voting laws in Georgia and teach your employees to be ‘less white’ than talk about the nationwide impact of your products on diabetes and obesity. If you’re Nike, you’d rather talk about slavery 200 years ago than talk about the Chinese slave labor that’s making your product today,” he said in an interview.
Ramaswamy has found a willing audience on conservative outlets like Fox News, although he said he thinks his ideas, which tie back to Citizens United, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that said corporations could spend unlimited amounts of money influencing politics, could be appealing to centrist and left-leaning voters too.
Ramaswamy said the Republican Party traditionally has been a “stooge of big business.”
“But I think that big business is becoming one of the biggest critics of capitalism itself, which is going to force the Republican Party to choose whether it’s going to be a stooge of big business, or whether it’s going to instead be a steward of everyday American voices that are being stifled as a result of big business,” he said.
