Getting out the business vote - includes related article on voting resources

Nation's Business, March, 1992 by David Warner

Business has developed a sweeping agenda for restoring long-term growth to the nation's economy and now faces the challenge of helping that plan become enacted into law.

Business's agenda, detailed in the cover story, on Page 18, is to be implemented in two phases. One phase calls for pressure on current members of Congress to accept the need for fundamental policy changes, as opposed to election-year quick fixes and gimmicks. The other phase centers on identifying and rallying support for congressional candidates who support business's basic approach.

"If current members of Congress will not endorce effective economic-growth policies, business must then move the debate to the political arena and work for the election of growth-oriented candidates to Congress in 1992," says Donald Kroes, vice president for legislative and public affairs for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber developed the business agenda after extensive consultation with its grass-roots membership.

"The next Congress will likely be taking action on a host of economic issues that affect business, including taxes, health care, and regulations," Kroes adds. "It's imperative to have legislators who will support policies that will help business."

The first step in that strategy, Kroes adds, is a commitment by individual business people to vote. While it is widely known that many--or, in some years, most--voting-age Americans neglect to vote (see the chart at right), business people are often surprised to find that the problem extends to their own ranks.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 30 percent of white-collar workers were not registered to vote in 1988--a presidential election year. And a quarter of those who were registered did not vote.

Of the total voting-age population, about 35 percent of Americans are not registered to vote. Of those who are registered, only about 65 percent--or, typically, less than half of all voting-age Americans--vote in nonpresidential election years.

To increase voter turnout, the U.S. Chamber is launching an initiative with the nonpartisan Vote America Foundation to encourage business owners and their employees to register to vote and, if need be, to vote by absentee ballot. (For details on obtaining materials designed to encourage voting among employees, see Page 28.) Vote America, in Washington, D.C., is a nonprofit group funded largely by businesses; its purpose is to increase voter registration and participation.

The Vote America initiative stems from the low voter participation long characteristic of Americans. Curtis Gans, director of the nonpartisan Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, a Washington-based research organization that seeks causes and cures for political nonparticipation, says: "Ninety percent of the low voter turnout and low registration problem and 100 percent of the decline [in voting relative to the voting-age population] is in motivation. The reason that people aren't voting is because ... they're not, in most cases, given a reason to vote."

This year, though, the public has a reason to vote, Gans says--the state of the economy. The country's economic pulse is barely perceptible. Last year the gross domestic product was 0.7 percent below the previous year's level. Factory orders and other growth indicators are down, unemployment is nearly 7 percent, and consumer confidence is low.

U.S. Chamber economists forecast GDP growth at an anemic 1.6 percent for 1992 unless Congress adopts the growth policies of the business agenda developed by the Chamber. That's why business involvement in this year's elections is critical, says the Chamber's Kroes, who points out that the 1992 elections will feature races for the presidency, all 435 U.S. House seats, and 35 of the 100 Senate seats.

Whatever the extent of its activities to fill those offices, however, business will find its political efforts strongly challenged. Despite its continually shrinking ranks, organized labor remains the driving force of many proposals that business sees as threats to economic recovery. Those proposals include health-care and family-leave mandates on employers, more regulations, a ban on replacement of striking workers, higher taxes on business, and stepped-up federal spending.

Much of the unions' continuing political influence on many members of Congress is the result of labor's political activities, which have long been better-financed and more sophisticated than those of business. It is estimated by some political experts that over the past several elections, organized labor has spent more than $200 million per two-year election cycle on in-kind political activities, such as phone banks and get-out-the-vote drives.

But concerted political action by business could turn things around, says Kroes. While pro-business legislators are now a minority in both houses of Congress, their ranks could be expanded into a majority through business support, the Chamber official says.

And business people are responding. Earl Hess, president and founder of Lancaster Laboratories, in Lancaster, Pa., says this is a particularly opportune time for increased political action by business: