Bankrolling the Big Lie
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Since the earliest months after the January 6, 2021 insurrection, CREW’s “This sedition is brought to you by…” tracker has been bringing accountability to the corporate PACs and industry groups that funnel money into the Sedition Caucus—those 147 members of Congress who voted against certifying the 2020 election, along with Donald Trump and, later, the 20 new members who won in the 2022 midterms promoting the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen.
However, not all those who undermine democracy are created equally. Some members of Congress have gone further than others to undermine our democracy by opposing legislation to protect future elections and refusing to take action to hold Donald Trump accountable for the January 6th insurrection. Our new tracker takes these nuances into account by ranking companies, not only by the sheer amount of money they give to the officials who undermine democracy, but also by the relative extremity of the lawmakers to whom they donate.
As CREW has written in the past, corporations depend on the stability and laws of a strong democracy in order to do business. Corporate executives face a critical decision on whether to financially support members of Congress who undermine democracy, as the current challenges to democracy threaten the foundations of a free and equal society. The undermining of votes and propagation of baseless lies pose systemic risks to both individuals and businesses, emphasizing the need for a collective commitment to preserving security and freedom.
For businesses, the decision holds significance as they rely on the stability, continuity and rule of law provided by the U.S. government. Taking a stand against lawlessness aligns with the long-term interests of companies benefiting from government protection of intellectual property, contract enforcement and support for American business interests at home and abroad, as well as the promise that officeholders won’t use positions of power to punish specific companies or industries that they feel aren’t sufficiently loyal. This shift reflects a departure from the traditional stance of taking American democracy for granted, with many corporate leaders now recognizing the fundamental business implications of safeguarding the rule of law and democratic principles.
In order to more precisely track companies’ political giving to members of Congress who are undermining democracy, we have created a new system for scoring companies’ support for democracy based on how much they are giving to members who have done the most to undermine it. Only companies that donated to the 168 members who ran on the Big Lie or voted to overturn the 2020 election are included, but the gifts are weighted to differentiate between those who have gone even further to advance the Big Lie and undermine democracy, both in the leadup to January 6th and since.
The criteria are as follows:
The data on this page will be updated as new filings come in and are processed. To create our company scores, we use these criteria to weight each member’s relative anti-democracy rating, and then use that coefficient to calculate each donor company’s score using the equation discussed in the methodology linked below.
Companies and industry groups keeping their commitments
First, there is some good news: Of the 230 companies that originally committed not to give to members of the Sedition Caucus, several dozen, including major international corporations like Nike, Lyft and eBay, have continued to make good on their pledge to make sure their political giving does not fund anti-democratic members of Congress—and have clearly done so without sacrificing their business prospects. In continuing to abstain from giving, these companies show it is possible to forgo the potential short-term benefits of political contributions for the longer-term health of the democracy, and they deserve recognition. We hope that these companies continue to maintain these commitments and that they will serve as an example of corporate responsibility for other companies to emulate.
Companies failing democracy
More than 1,100 companies have made contributions to anti-democratic members of Congress, including nearly 200 companies that originally committed not to give. To be clear, none of these companies committed to never give again. Some of the companies committed to not giving for a period of months, or for an election cycle, but as this tracker makes clear, the threat posed to democracy that was so apparent on January 6, 2021 has not gone away. January 6th is, in some ways, every day now, as the very members who helped foment the violent, unprecedented attack on the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in history remain anything but contrite. These very members continue to support Trump—the attack’s chief orchestrator—push election lies and put up barriers to accountability for efforts to erode our democracy. The threat is not gone and, as such, companies undermine the effect of their original commitments by continuing to give to these members now.
A note on donations to party committees
CREW is not including donations to party committees in this analysis, and we wanted to briefly explain why we made that decision here. In another ongoing project tracking corporate contributions to the Sedition Caucus, CREW has included contributions to Republican party committees that support GOP members of Congress, namely the NRSC and the NRCC, as a factor in deciding which companies to highlight. There were several reasons for that inclusion. Most importantly, the committees have spent millions supporting individual members who have been actively eroding faith in democracy as measured against the metrics described above. That support has taken the form of direct contributions and independent expenditures on ads. Further, the NRSC specifically was headed after the insurrection by Senator Rick Scott, who was one of the eight senators who voted not to certify the 2020 election. As a result, we determined that it made sense to include party committees in that earlier tracker to get a fuller picture of companies’ support for those who voted against certifying the 2020 election.
While we continue to track those contributions in our Sedition Caucus tracker, we are not including them here. That’s because this tracker is meant to zero in specifically on the direct support that corporations give to the members of Congress who are doing the most to undermine American democracy. While party-level contributions may well be relevant to a more fulsome assessment of the campaign finance ecosystem, we decided to consider only direct support to those members using their position to undermine democracy. This approach offers the most focused and nonpartisan basis for identifying which companies are spending money to support anti-democracy members of Congress.
Industry groups supporting anti-democratic politicians
While most Americans don’t interact much with trade associations and similar organizations which exist to promote the interests of dues-paying corporations and industry members, these groups have a lot of power in Washington, often spending as much or more on political donations compared to their member companies. Nearly 600 such groups have given contributions to the Sedition Caucus, including nearly two dozen that committed not to give in the wake of the insurrection.
Search Companies and Industry Groups
CREW’s database of corporate donors to members of Congress undermining democracy includes more than 1,400 companies and industry groups, all of which have been scored based on their giving. You can search the full set below.