Business
can impact
Nevada’s swing voters
Employees
want to hear from their companies:
How will public policy
measures impact them?
By Steven
Miller
BusinessNevada
Although many Nevada
business people don’t know it, they easily constitute the
most potentially powerful new political force in the Silver
State.
That’s the message
that Gregory Casey brought to Nevada this week.
Casey, a native
Westerner and president of the Business-Industry Political
Action Committee (BIPAC), spoke at the Nevada Manufacturing
Association’s annual dinners Tuesday and Wednesday in
Northern and Southern Nevada.
A trustee of the
Center for the New West in Boise, Idaho, Casey is also a
political veteran with more than 28 years of hands-on
experience in over dozens of local, state and federal
campaigns.
What business people
often miss, says Casey, is that their employees want to
hear their company’s take on candidates, issues and
elections. Polls have shown that as high as four out of five
workers desire this information. Employees also cite their
employer as their single most trusted source of information.
Moreover, research
shows that the more employees hear from their companies about
political subjects, the more they approve of and want the
information—and the more inclined they are to participate in
the election process.
This means, says
Casey, that much of American business now can bring a powerful
grassroots effort to public policy decisions.
“The
modern, dual-income, heavily invested voting family seeks more
personal information relevant to their daily lives,” he told
Bloomberg News last year. “The employer is the single most
credible source of information for that person.”
BIPAC was founded in
1963 as the nation’s first business political action
committee. Today, through its Prosperity Project, it helps
businesses promote good public policy through employee
education.
A BIPAC 2004 report
boasts that the Prosperity Project's get-out-the-vote
operation, which includes Internet-based information
operations for companies hosted by BIPAC, has grown from 50
companies and trade associations when it was started in 2000
to more than 900 today. Participants include giants like Exxon
Mobil Corp., International Paper Co. and Caterpillar Inc., but
also many smaller companies.
“Including emails,
fliers put in employee paychecks and other communications,”
says the report, “the Prosperity Project sent out 40 million
messages in 2004, up from 1.5 million in 2000.”
In an era when
often-strident and highly partisan political parties turn off
moderate voters, leaders of BIPAC and the Prosperity Project
appear to have found a way to reach these voters effectively.
After all, says Casey, what employers and employees both want
is a prospering company with prospering employees. Thus,
companies bring to the political wars a tremendous asset: a
group of people with a shared, personal stake in the
candidates and policies that stand to impact the company’s
jobs and industry.
The BIPAC approach
appears to be paying off. Going into the 2004 campaign season,
the group projected (based on previous elections) that the
usual channels of political information—TV, radio,
newspapers—would not address business issues. Or, even if
those channels attempted to do so, they would not sort out
where candidates stood on those issues. So, while both
political parties would be seeking to turn out their firmly
committed base-voters, many swing voters would remain confused
and “persuadable” until the end.
Sure enough, the
election was decided by small margins of voters in critical
locations. BIPAC claims an important share of the credit for
the 2004 Bush victory, citing its efforts in battleground
states where the Project delivered “significantly higher
pro-business voter turnout in state and federal contests from
coast to coast.”
In Nevada, the report
notes, Bush’s margin was 20,000 votes, after the state
Prosperity project connected with more than 100,000 voters. In
New Mexico, the Bush margin of victory was 12,000 votes after
the Project reached 170,000 employees. In Iowa, Bush carried
the state by 13,000 votes, after the Iowa Project provided
26,000 voter registrations and early ballots, and delivered
messages to 50,011 employees. And in Ohio Prosperity Fund
efforts increased Ohio employee participation by 1.26 million
employees.
The significance of
all this for the future of Silver State politics should be
clear. Today’s conventional political wisdom presumes that
organized labor—especially the powerful and voracious
government union cliques—will continue dominating the state
and preying on taxpayers and business for years to come.
But knocking at the
door for Nevada business is a new, potent and robust
grassroots approach that, after just four years is already,
according to survey research, having an impact in the
workforce equal that of organized labor.
Which means, happily,
that the conventional wisdom about Nevada’s future is wrong.
<741 words>
Steven Miller is
editor of BusinessNevada and policy director for the Nevada
Policy Research Institute.
