The Partisan Realignment of Business

 The Partisan Realignment of American Business:Evidence from a Survey of Corporate LeadersEitan Hersh and Sarang Shah*August 1, 2023. Abstract 

For decades, the business community has been viewed as a core constituency of the Republican Party. However, several factors, such as corporate prioritization of social values and anti-business sentiment among Republican rank-and-file, suggest a majorcoalitional shift is underway. Scholars have debated whether this shift is an illusion or is real. At the core of this debate is how business leaders navigate two forms of organizational conflict: a.) stakeholder cross-pressure, and b.) policy cross-pressure. To measure cross-pressure, we conduct an original survey of elite business leaders. Our evidence suggests a widespread view that companies are increasingly aligned withthe Democrats, including in alignment on core policy priorities. When companies are cross-pressured, leaders perceive the company as leaning toward the Democrats. The decoupling of business from the Republican coalition represents one of the most significant changes in American politics in decades

No Realignment

At the Monkey Cage, John sides offers an extremely sensible analysis of the presidential election:

The term “realignment” gets thrown around casually, sometimes suggesting nothing more than “something big is happening.” But the term has a more precise meaning—indeed, it must have a precise meaning in order for it to mean anything. A realignment is predicated on three things. First, there has to be a dramatic and permanent shift in the party coalitions. Second, the shift in coalitions needs to usher in an extended period of party control. Third, the shift in control needs to bring about a notable shift in policy. One can see how the “New Deal coalition” approximates this definition, since it ushered in decades of one-party dominance in Congress, particularly in the House, and brought about not only the New Deal but arguably the Great Society.

No such thing has happened since Obama was elected in 2008. It is true that the demography of the country is changing slowly, and groups that have tended to vote Democratic are becoming more numerous. So the Democratic party coalition has the potential for continuing growth. Will that growth translate into enduring power and policy change? It certainly didn’t in 2010. Yes, the 2010 electorate was not the 2012 electorate. But that’s the point: a realignment doesn’t take midterm elections off.

So what about 2012? What is most remarkable about 2012 is not its radical change but instead enduring stability—very modest shifts in state outcomes relative to 2008, relative even to 2000. Very modest shifts in House and Senate seat shares. In terms of policymaking, the 2012 election simply returned the status quo: divided government. This doesn’t mean that policy won’t get made, and maybe Congress will pass policies that Democrats have favored more than Republicans, such as a tax increase for the wealthy or comprehensive immigration reform. But nothing about the current configuration of Congress foreshadows a dramatic shift in policy.

Recent posts have documented the stability he discusses.  Yes, Romney won the white vote while Obama won the rest.  But except for 1964, the same pattern has held in every election in the past sixty years.  There has been some fluctuation among religious groups, but the shifts between 2008 and 2012 were all in single digits.  And far from being a "shellacking" or "thrashing," the president's electoral college victory was actually below average for winning candidates.  His party failed to make substantial gains in the House, and picked up seats in the Senate mainly because of individual candidates and political conditions in the states.  He did not have Senate coattails: in most Senate key races, the Democratic winners ran ahead of him.

Realignment and the South

Our chapter on political parties discusses the concept of partisan realignment, the shift of voting strength from one party to another. The South has been trending Republican since the 1950s, first in presidential elections, then in statewide elections. During the 1990s, the bulk of its House seats moved to the GOP. The last stronghold of Southern Democrats consisted of state legislatures. As Jonathan Martin explains in Politico, that stronghold fell in 2010:

Protected by a potent mix of gerrymandering, pork, seniority and a friends-and-neighbors electorate, Democratic state representatives and senators managed to survive through the South’s GOP evolution — the Reagan years, the Republican landslide of 1994 and George W. Bush’s two terms. Yet scores of them retired or went down in defeat earlier this month. And at least 10 more across three states have changed parties since the elections, with rumors swirling through state capitols of more to come before legislative sessions commence in January. Facing the prospect of losing their seats through reapportionment — if not in the next election — others will surely choose flight over fight.

Democrats lost both chambers of the legislature this year in North Carolina and Alabama, meaning that they now control both houses of the capitol in just two Southern states, Arkansas and Mississippi, the latter of which could flip to the GOP in the next election.

The losses and party switching, one former Southern Democratic governor noted, “leave us with little bench for upcoming and future elections.”

“There's little reason to be optimistic in my region,” said this former governor, who did not want to be quoted by name offering such a downcast assessment. “We can opportunistically pick up statewides every now and then, but building a sustainable party program isn't in the cards. I suppose the president has bigger concerns now, but it’s not healthy for the Democrats to write off our region and not have any real strategy to be competitive.”

Part of the reason for this pessimism is that the Democrats who were defeated and those who are changing parties are overwhelmingly of the same type: rural white males who are more conservative than their national party.

With a few isolated exceptions, it now seems that the party’s rural Southern tradition is a thing of the past — even at the statehouse level, where familiar faces were able for years to make the case that they were a different kind of Democrat.