Time to Review Your PAC
I have to admit my surprise when companies began reassessing corporate political contributions (PACs or political action contributions) since the insurgent Capitol attack on January 6th. The reason for my surprise was that I had lightly touched on the danger of PACs in my December 2021 reputation trends and whoah—here we are today with increasingly more companies “pausing” their PACs, particularly to politicians who supported President Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election results. I was apparently not the only one to be surprised by how quickly company fever over PACs arose. Popular Information, the newsletter by Judd Legum which has been all over this topic for quite a while and innocently asked some 145 companies post-January 6th if they were going to continue with their political spending, was taken aback too. A good many companies actually wrote him back and before he knew it, he was the source on the avalanche of companies curtailing their political spending behavior. He recently wrote:
“Popular Information's report quickly became a national and international story, receiving coverage in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, The Financial Times, Reuters, MarketWatch, Forbes, Business Insider, The Daily Beast, Axios, and other publications.”
Legum quoted Public Citizen’s remark in his newsletter about the unprecedented nature of these corporate withdrawals or pauses:
“These corporations are doing something very new, and something that could potentially alienate an important base for them,” said Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen, a money-in-politics group. “I’ve never heard of this happening before.”
The story continues to unfold every day. Companies are now on the record for their words and actions in response to January 6th. What they have said publicly and internally are words they are going to have to live by when the next highly charged event arises.
JUST Capital has the most recent data on what Americans think about political spending from companies post-January 6th.
62% say that as consumers they will hold companies accountable for not speaking out after the attack on the Capitol
69% recommend pausing ALL political spending to reassess donation strategies
58% see political spending by companies as a threat to democracy
Most interesting was JUST’s finding that 57% of Americans believe that companies should stop donating to Congresspeople who challenged the vote certification (Republicans’ 45% to Democrats’ 74% in favor). Just seeing that nearly one half of Republicans are in favor of stopping support for congressional men and women who thought the vote was rigged is a startling high number. The events of January 6th have had an outsized impact on perceptions about corporate behavior and the role of business to stand up for democracy.