Approximately 170 corporations, including some 60 Fortune 500 companies, are participating in an ambitious plan to mobilize employees in the presidential and congressional elections 15 months away.
The effort, developing since the 1998 election cycle, is intended to counteract the powerful grassroots organization of labor and other liberal interests that often clash with business on policy.
While the effort, dubbed the Prosperity Project, is nominally bipartisan, it is certain to favor Republican candidates, who are generally viewed as friendlier to business than Democrats.
In addition to the 170 companies, the project also includes about 100 trade associations. Close to 100 of the 270 groups have joined this year. The project was masterminded by the Business Industry Political Action Committee (BIPAC), which gave $172,000 to Republican candidates in 2002 and less than $9,000 to Democrats.
Participants, including companies such as ExxonMobil, Procter & Gamble and International Paper, and trade associations such as The Business Roundtable and The Financial Services Roundtable, have already contacted 1.5 million employees, said Greg Casey, BIPAC president.
Widespread participation from corporate America this early, and ambitious voter turnout plans being developed by the Republican National Committee (RNC) and the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), are foreboding developments for Democrats.
Led by new chairman Ed Gillespie, the RNC is looking to expand the 72 Hour Task Force, the voter mobilization program Democrats say was key to the gains Republicans made last year.
At the same time, the NRCC under chairman Tom Reynolds (R-N.Y.) is planning a massive expansion of its grassroots program, calling on every non-vulnerable incumbent to recruit 500 volunteers to campaign in tough races.
Democrats and their labor allies have traditionally enjoyed an advantage over Republicans and their corporate allies in the so-called ground war, the battle to get sympathetic voters to the polls. Republicans have dominated the airwaves, raising considerably more money to spend on television ads.
But while Republicans are certain to increase their fundraising advantage significantly, due largely to campaign finance reform, Democrats and their labor allies are unlikely to increase their advantage in voter mobilization. Instead, they will have to fight to lose as little ground as possible.
Democrats have dismissed the NRCC's voter mobilization plans as unrealistically ambitious, but businesses have taken real steps to develop an infrastructure to contact and turn out voters.
Because labor was so effective in the '90s and early this decade in educating members and getting them to the polls, it has less room for improvement. Corporate political strategists see stock-owning, non-unionized business employees as a sleeping giant.
Union membership has remained fairly static, but the number of Americans who own stock, identify themselves in the investor class, and as a result share the interests of corporate America, has surged by 20 percent since 1992, according to data compiled by pollster James Zogby. More than 70 percent of voters identified themselves as investors in 2000.
Studies commissioned by BIPAC and conducted by the Tarrance Group, a GOP polling firm, found that in the 2000 election cycle labor contacted 17 percent of the electorate while corporate employers contacted only 7 percent. Forty-seven percent of union members heard from union organizers.
"Business has been slow to utilize the same tools as labor, even though elections law allows the same tools to each," corporate researchers concluded.
The Prosperity Project's main goal is to educate employees about which policies help their employers and which politicians support those policies, and to ensure that they vote on Election Day. In many cases that means providing employees with voter registration forms and absentee ballots.
John Runyan, Washington representative for International Paper, a company with 60,000 employees in the United States, said technology provided by the project enabled his company to create a website to educate its workers about how Congress affects their jobs.
"We put up things like the tailored voting records of members of Congress on issues we care about and make it available to anyone in the company with web access," he said. "We spend a lot of time and effort encouraging people to view their members' records and to download absentee ballots."
John Castellani, president of The Business Roundtable, which has 150 corporate members, said companies at first were skeptical that their political arguments would be credible among employees. But corporate research found that 23 percent of voters viewed their employers as the most credible source of political information while 16 percent viewed their unions that way.
"This is a very important tool in the toolkit of all the things the business community has to make Congress sensitive to its policies and how it affects jobs," said Castellani.
Former Rep. Steve Bartlett (R-Texas), president of The Financial Services Roundtable, said the Prosperity Project would also allow employers to involve employees in efforts to lobby Congress.
Bartlett said member companies of his coalition use the project to "encourage [employees] to write letters, make phone calls, and see [their representatives] at town hall meetings."