Corporations Silent on Why They Pulled Funding from Republicans Who Questioned an Election, but Not Democrats Who Did the Same
New York | August 2, 2021
Corporations were silent on why they chose to suspend political contributions to Republicans, but not Democrats who have objected to election results.
More than 15 major U.S. companies that announced they would suspend giving money to members of Congress following the Jan. 6 Capitol riot didn’t respond to requests for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation about their political contribution activity following the 2016 presidential election. The corporations were quick to condemn Republicans lawmakers who voted against certifying the 2020 presidential election earlier this year, but apparently didn’t criticize or punish Democrats who have similarly objected to election results in the past.
“These corporations are doing something very new, and something that could potentially alienate an important base for them,” Craig Holman, a lobbyist at Public Citizen, told The Washington Post in January. “I’ve never heard of this happening before.”
On Jan. 6, nearly 150 Republican lawmakers — eight senators and 139 representatives — objected to the 2020 presidential election results of at least one state, The New York Times reported. Pennsylvania and Arizona received the most amount of GOP objections while four other states received one objection apiece.
Meanwhile, during the vote, throngs of former President Donald Trump’s supporters breached the Capitol building in protest of the election results. The crowd stormed the building after attending Trump’s speech at a nearby rally in which he claimed the election had been rigged and rife with fraud.
In the days following the riot and the failed Republican effort to overturn the election, around 280 corporations announced they would either conduct a review their political donation activity or no longer support those who had voted to decertify, according to a CNN database…. (Excerpts from the Virginia Star)