On the Need For Business Democrats
The Democratic Party Needs to Integrate Business into its Coalition
The Democratic party is currently in a period of self-reflection & strategic reconstruction. The loss of the 2024 election to Donald Trump and the administration’s subsequent interpretation of a 1.5% popular vote edge and 3 seat house margin as an overwhelming mandate to dismantle and revert the government to the state it was in sometime between 1960 and 1860 has left the party in a scramble to figure out what went wrong and how to organize victory in the future.
Some are arguing for a revision of aspects of the party’s governing philosophy away from proceduralism and towards outcomes, or to emphasize working class economic issues over campus identity politics. Others are focusing on tactics, either demanding fights over the myriad legal breaches of the Trump Administration as loudly as possible or advising the party to sit back and avoid generating partisan polarization while waiting for a governing team defined by its inexperience and hostility towards the institutions of government to shoot itself in the foot.
This article is going to look at a different approach than what other thinkers are raising. The elevator pitch for this might be phrased as something like “Democrats and the Democratic party should be more visibly pro-business.”
That’s obviously a little vague, so perhaps a short list of bullet points can help elucidate what is meant by the “Business Democrat” plan:
More elected Democrats should have a background working in the private sector, rather than academia, non-profits or government.
Democrats should view friendly private sector businesses as a co-equal coalition partner alongside labor unions and nonprofits.
If these bullet points still leave something unclear, perhaps some examples of problems with the current Democratic approach to politics and how the Business Democrat framework might help fix this can be useful.
Democratic politicians aren’t businesspeople.
If you look at current and past grandees of the Democratic Party, you’ll notice that, almost universally, they’ve never worked in capital B Business. Joe Biden held elected office basically nonstop since 1973. Nancy Pelosi’s first paycheck was earned representing San Francisco in Congress. Elizabeth Warren, despite writing and thinking a ton about business prior to her election to the Senate, always did so from the outside as an academic. Barack Obama, prior to his first election victory in 1996, was a lawyer, a law professor, and a community organizer. But what the hell is a community organizer? Do you know what that is? Could you explain what one does to your grandfather?
Contrast with the Republican party which is rife with businesspeople. Mitt Romney was a partner at Bain Capital and helped rescue of the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics from financial ruin, which voters see as “businessy” even if they don’t know exactly what either of those occupations actually require day-to-day. Michael Bloomberg first ran for mayor of New York as a Republican on the back of his experience founding and managing his eponymous company.
And then there’s Donald Trump. Die-hard liberals can quibble about Trump’s many bankruptcies, his habit of screwing over contractors, or how he really only played a successful real estate magnate on The Apprentice. But cast your thoughts back to your grandfather. Does he understand that, or does he just see Donald Trump as the guy that he first heard about as a successful businessman on the TV? First impressions tend to be sticky.
But who cares? Why does it matter that the Democrats field fewer businesspeople in elections than Republicans?
Twofold.
First, a lack of elected officials with prior business experience makes Democratic governance worse. America is a market economy and private business employs most American workers, so if they falter due to bad business regulation, so does the economy writ large. When a progressive city’s legislature is writing business regulations without the perspective of someone who’s been on the receiving end of such regulation, you’re likely to wind up with nonsense like formula retail bans that punish locally grown businesses for their own success or force owners to kiss up to their supervisor for a regulatory variance to move locations.
Beyond improving governance, having more people with business backgrounds running for office can contribute to electoral victories that are effectively closed to the current stable of Democratic candidates. Like it or not, the image of your average swing voter has of your typical Democratic elected official is career politician, a combination of words considered only slightly less loathsome than “puppy kicker” or “seal clubber.”
If Democrats want to win votes in enough places to have a shot at retaking seemingly unwinnable places like the US Senate or the Texas governor’s mansion, then running non-politicians is a must. You can see the seedlings of this in the strategy taken in the 2024 Senate race in Nebraska, where Democrats opted not to run their own candidate, instead putting their support behind Dan Osborn, an independent union boss candidate. That race still wound up going to the Republican, but Osborn managed to lose by 7% in a state Kamala Harris lost by 20%.
Some left-wing commentators might protest that this is evidence that the Democratic Party should run more union leaders and people with employment backgrounds in manufacturing and the like, rather than people with a business background. But at the very least these people would agree that the Democrats need more candidates that break the mold of the typical stuffed shirt who’s never worked outside government or academia.
Democratic politics needs to appeal to businesses
Beyond the level of elected officials, the Democratic Party should also endeavor to bring business interests into the party in policy-making and campaigning. This means soliciting endorsements from noteworthy business leaders, seeking input from business when crafting policy, and engaging the business community when trying to sell policies to the public.
To be clear, this is not a call for the Democratic Party to become a party by and for business interests, exclusively. Rather it is a call for business to be given a seat at the Democrats’ coalitional table that is considered co-equal to non-profits, identity based interest groups, and labor unions, as opposed to the current situation where Democrats treat business with indifference at best and active hostility at worst.
Doing this can improve Democrats’ ability to win hard elections by creating bases of support in areas where their traditional allies are weaker. Take a state like Iowa, where labor unions are weak, there are few minority voters, and large agribusiness concerns play a major role in the state economy. These agricultural interests see the Democratic Party, with its base of environmentalists, anti-trade labor organizations, and hipster antitrust academics, as a party that would ignore their input and interests. Consequently, they overwhelmingly support Republicans.
But it could be possible for Democrats to try to peel off some parts of the Republican business coalition and get them to actively support Democrats. Such has been done in the past by figures like Lyndon Johnson, who managed to get anti-union, anti-New Deal construction and oil interests to support him in his guise as a pro-FDR New Deal Democrat. Their support for Johnson may have bent him away from the doctrinaire New Deal Liberalism of many of his Democratic contemporaries. But in supporting Johnson, they weren’t supporting the more explicitly anti-New Deal Republicans and Southern Democrats that were just as much on the table for them.
While it would behoove Democrats to try the Johnson strategy of currying favor with business interests such as Iowa agribusiness, they shouldn’t be under any illusion that they’re going to make grain elevator operators and the corn lobby into a 90-10 Democratic constituency, given the role non-economic issues like abortion play among such groups.
But simply peeling away a few players in this space can still have an outsized benefit for Democrats. If you can push industry support for Republicans from 75-25 to something closer to 50-50, it can help create a permission structure for cross-pressured voters. In a House race in a historically Republican district with a strong Democratic candidate and a weak Republican, making it ambiguous which candidate has the support of local business can take economic issues off the table and allow undecided voters to pick the candidate they find more charismatic or who they think will represent them more forcefully.
Democrats Need Businesses to Champion Good Policy
Beyond creating permission structures for wavering voters and opening more races to active contestation, cultivating better ties with the business community can also help create champions for Democratic policies that are left as orphans by the party’s existing coalitional partners.
Consider the case of environmental regulations in the context of permitting green energy. For ages, efforts to build out solar and wind power have been held up in court by litigants wielding environmental protection laws, even in cases where it seems blatantly obvious that the environmental benefits of a project far outweigh its costs. There have been efforts to reform these laws to make building green energy easier. But they have suffered from not having a pro-reform constituency within the Democratic coalition.
Environmental groups support these laws because they give them the authority to act as arbiters of what’s truly “Green” in court. Labor groups like these laws because they give unions an asymmetric advantage in negotiations with construction companies, since unions can sue to stop projects on environmental grounds, but construction companies can’t use environmental lawsuits to curtail union power.
Bringing solar power and construction interests into the Democratic tent creates a champion of reform efforts that can push its interests as a member of the coalition in good standing that can’t be brushed off the way oil and gas interests are when they complain about the permitting process. This sort of support for reform from within could be what helps tip the scale in favor of reform, as the current supporters of reform, YIMBY groups and academics, haven’t been able to produce this change on their own.
Even if these specific arguments don’t fully indicate the merits of the Business Democrat strategy, they hopefully help show why it can be a useful approach for the party to take.
For decades, Democrats have had an economy problem. Despite the economy persistently doing better under Democratic presidencies than Republican ones, Republicans consistently get rated as better stewards of the economy by voters.
A big part of why this is the case may well trace back to the close relationship between Republican and business interests, paired with Democrats rhetorical weakness when it comes to talking about business. Running more people with business backgrounds and running on policies that have input and buy-in from relevant business groups could help shore up this weakness in the party.
I had never really considered that democrats were so generally business clueless. This is a great perspective, and something that the democratic party should heed. Excellent analysis!