Businesses targeting their own employees in voting blitz

By Chad Merda

Why bother donating cash to a political campaign when you can participate in a much cheaper form of support by getting out the vote. And many business leaders are doing just that — targeting their own employees — in an effort to block the tea party.

Ben Tarbutton, vice president at a railroad company in Sandersville, Georgia, told Bloomberg Businessweek he’s doing just that. Tarbutton is encouraging his employees to vote, and is making sure they know he’s supporting U.S. Representative Jack Kingston (R).

If you don’t have the right candidate out of the primary, that’s going to hamper your efforts in the general, he said.

Such a strategy is being mirrored in other states holding primaries today, in an effort to weed out untested candidates that could win the primary, but wouldn’t stand much of a chance in November.

As an added bonus, employers can steer the vote toward candidates that are more friendly to businesses.

Employers can be the most credible source of information for their employees, said Greg Casey, president and chief executive officer of the Business-Industry Political Action Committee, a Washington-based advocacy group whose members include a majority of Fortune 100 companies. We grind this down to granular detail and provide the tools and the calendar of the messages to be sent.

Via Bloomberg Businessweek

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