These should be good times for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The nation’s largest business lobby has long had disagreements with President Donald Trump along with ideological affinity with Republicans in the Senate. The 2020 election results aren’t final. But all signs point to the type of outcome that should have them content: divided government, with Joe Biden in the White House and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) running the upper chamber.
And yet, the chamber finds itself in, perhaps, the most precarious political position ever. The group angered its long-standing allies on the right by endorsing a number of House Democrats during the 2020 cycle. And while most of the Democratic incumbents the group backed look to be headed for re-election, party leaders say they feel no allegiance or gratitude to the chamber for what they’re describing as surface-level support.
Republicans, by contrast, didn’t see that support as perfunctory at all. They viewed the chamber’s actions this cycle as an act of treachery.
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“The Chamber is morally compromised,” said John Feehery, a longtime GOP operative.
And to hear them tell it, the business lobby is persona non grata in GOP circles for the foreseeable future.
“You couldn’t piss your credibility away faster. They’ll teach political science classes for decades on this epic level of malpractice,” said Sam Geduldig, a longtime Republican lobbyist and former House GOP aide. “The business community deserves better. The endorsements have become political malpractice. The chamber’s donors and members are worse off today than they were yesterday and that didn’t need to be the case.”
The uncertain fate of the chamber in the nation’s capital is, in a way, a microcosm of the difficult-to-define political climate in which the country now finds itself. Trump’s ascendance in Republican politics has greatly disrupted the type of coalition politics that had driven American government for decades. And he’s forced traditional establishment entities to reassess their place in that firmament.
The chamber thinks that it’s found an effective advocacy model in that environment, with a focus on potential crossover issues such as infrastructure spending and workforce development. “We feel like the chamber is well prepared to make sure that business’ voice is heard in this new government,” Neal Bradley, the group’s executive vice president and chief policy officer, told reporters on Wednesday. “We see an opportunity to work with Republicans and Democrats to get a lot of important things done over the next two years, in part because we cannot afford to not get things done.”
For an organization that routinely ranked as one of Republicans’ top outside spenders during the Obama years, the chamber has been forced to navigate a policy environment in which the right side of the political spectrum is less in sync with many of the business community’s top priorities. The chamber has clashed with the president on a host of fronts, including trade and immigration. President Donald Trump received just one $15 contribution from a chamber employee during the 2020 cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Joe Biden’s campaign, in contrast, got more than $20,000.
As the two parties’ ideological cohorts shifted in the Trump era, so too did the allegiances of candidates receiving backing from the Chamber. Late in the 2020 cycle, the group threw its weight behind 23 of the House’s most vulnerable Democrats. As of Thursday afternoon, 11 of them had won re-election with another five in the lead.
That move earned the enmity of not only top Republicans but even some of the Chamber's own members and top officials. Scott Reed, a top political strategist at the Chamber, publically split with the group just over a month before Election Day. Reed said he was resigning in protest; the chamber insisted he’d been fired for cause. Either way, his departure underscored the divisions in the organization. “I can no longer be part of this institution as it moves left,” Reed told Politico at the time.
The Chamber characterized the congressional endorsements not as a shift in its political strategy but, on the contrary, as adhering to its longstanding standards for candidate endorsements.
“Members of Congress, incumbent members, earn the chamber’s endorsement. We don't simply decide that person’s worth endorsing and this person isn’t,” Neal Bradley, the group’s executive vice president and chief policy officer, told reporters in a press call on Wednesday. “The Democrats that we endorsed… earned the endorsement by scoring above 70 percent on our scorecard, the same threshold that earned 192 House Republicans that endorsement.”
For Democratic operatives working on frontline House races, the endorsements actually were considered helpful. One top Democratic aide said that some members spent “a whole year” courting the group for its backing and, when it came, were able to convert it into a selling point for their bipartisan, pro-business bona fides.
But it wasn’t universally well-received. Other groups in the Democratic coalition, such as labor unions and the anti-dark money entities, raised their concerns about the party opening the door to a big business entity that is funded, in part, by unknown donations from corporations. In the eyes of other Democrats, the Chamber didn’t go far enough for them this cycle.
FEC filings show that the Chamber’s political action committee donated roughly the same amounts, on average, to the Democratic and Republican House members it endorsed. But a review of campaign finance records shows that the group reported advertising expenditures in support of just three House members total during the 2020 elections, two of them Republicans. The chamber also took out a round of digital ads in late 2019 and early 2020 accusing a handful of House Democrats of voting to eliminate thousands of jobs by supporting a bill to reduce drug prices. Months later, one of the members targeted by those ads, New Jersey Democrat Rep. Andy Kim, nonetheless found himself on the slate of the chamber’s late-cycle endorsements.
But the bigger issue for Democrats is the lengthy history of acrimony they have with the Chamber, fueled by policy advocacy campaigns it ran against top Democratic priorities during the Obama years.
For years and years, the Chamber has been one of the biggest spenders in the aid of Republican candidates and causes. The group dipped into its massive pockets to fund elections for GOP office-seekers and helped finance ad campaigns to derail ambitious Democratic agenda items, most notably Obamacare.
Along the way, there were efforts to try and build bridges. In 2006, Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), on his way to becoming majority leader, reached out to the chamber after being “inspired”—in the words of his then spokesman Jim Manley—to do so by long-time GOP pollster Frank Luntz.
“He engaged in some convos with them and ditto with staff. I leaked a story or two. But it proved all for naught,” Manley said. “It was all talk and no cattle.”
In 2013, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) reached out to the lobby again, this time to help craft measures on a prospective immigration reform bill, which the Chamber supported. And while the collaboration worked, one Schumer aide remembered the aftermath more vividly. The bill never made it into law and “in the years following that, they absolutely didn't lift a finger and in some cases actively opposed Democrats who backed them on key priorities,” the aide said.
That animus lingers to this day. One top Democratic lobbyist said of the chamber, “Schumer fucking hates them. I've heard him verbalize it”—a sentiment two former Schumer aides didn’t dispute.
“They spent enormous amounts of money to elect Republicans,” the lobbyist said. “I don't begrudge it, but they took some serious bets that pissed off Schumer, like going against Evan Bayh (during the 2014 cycle), who should have been an easy endorsement for them. Now they flip, but they haven't really done anything. They basically endorsed the Democrats but didn't really do anything.”
The Chamber, for its part, doesn’t see it that way. And the Democrats they did endorse appreciated the backing, many of them prominently touting their chamber endorsements as evidence of their pragmatism and bipartisan credentials. Rep. Joe Cunningham (D-S.C.), who narrowly lost his re-election bid last week, tweeted out in full the letter he’d received from Tom Donohue, the Chamber’s chief executive.
About two weeks later, the pro-Trump media outlet Breitbart News wrote up a story on the slate of Democratic endorsements. “THE GREAT BETRAYAL,” its headline blared.
