Alex Brandon/AP Photo
John Fetterman, who rallied to flip a Senate seat in Pennsylvania, questioned why inflation should “lead to record profits for corporate America.”
I heard about it from every candidate I talked to this year. They pointed to a vote held in May in the House of Representatives on the Consumer Fuel Price Gouging Prevention Act, which would have enhanced the powers of the Federal Trade Commission to go after corporate price-gouging by gas companies, as well as giving the president additional tools to crack down.
Not a single Republican voted for this bill, which in retrospect was kind of an epic mistake since they had no reason not to; it was never going to pass the Senate anyway. The oil company price-gouging bill became a well-worn talking point among Democrats; maybe not their most prominent broadcast message, but definitely part of their framing.
Teasing out the themes of an election and what caused winners to win and losers to lose is always a bit of a mug’s game. Given the divergent realities liberals and conservatives live in, and the mercurial beliefs of swing voters, it’s hard to attribute election outcomes to one issue or topic. Certainly, the dominant theme in Democratic ads, abortion rights, played a major role in helping Democrats to a decent night. Certainly candidate quality, as my colleague Harold Meyerson has broken down, played a role as well.
But it would be wrong to say that Democrats won despite a lack of an economic message. The message was always lurking in the background in campaigns. And that message correlated with a populist frame of fighting corporate power.
This website sounded the alarm about the need to foreground this message. But what that message would be was always pretty clear. For months now, Americans have been fairly well convinced that corporate profit-taking had a lot to do with inflation. Amazingly, near the end of this election, the chief economist at UBS Global Wealth Management agreed that companies “have also taken advantage of circumstances to expand profit margins.” In fact, he argued, the corporate profit story was a triumph of media narratives, which convinced people to accept that prices were going to go up, providing a window of opportunity for profit-taking.
This wasn’t news if you knew where to look for the news, in earnings calls and insider whispering. Facile rebuttals like “the economy didn’t suddenly get concentrated” (actually, 2020 and 2021 were record years for mergers) and “monopolies can raise prices anytime because they’re monopolies” neglect the ways in which opportunistic price-taking manifests, a function of loose coordination and expectations-setting.
House Democrats have been aligned with this perspective for a while. An Oversight Committee report released last week testifies to this, attributing the corporate profit story to rising concentration throughout the economy. And they didn’t just put it in dry reports that nobody reads, they ran on it.
John Fetterman, who rallied to flip a Senate seat in Pennsylvania, used this framing in his closing argument, questioning why inflation should “lead to record profits for corporate America.” I saw Fetterman two days before the election in Bucks County, and there he focused more on raising the minimum wage (which the standard economist take would say is decidedly inflationary, though there is no sign of wage-push inflation currently), protecting Social Security and Medicare, and fighting for more union representation. But he ran a number of op-eds in newspapers throughout the state on this issue near the end of the race.
For months now, Americans have been fairly well convinced that corporate profit-taking had a lot to do with inflation.
In Pittsburgh, the seat currently held by Conor Lamb will be filled by Chris Deluzio, a populist whose closing ad hit his opponent for being a “corporate jagoff” and attacked “rising prices, lousy trade deals, and corporate price-gouging.”
In New York, Pat Ryan’s race remains tight, but the incumbent who won a special election in August is as likely as any candidate to buck one of the few states where there appears to have been an actual red wave. Many attributed Ryan’s special-election win to abortion, but the ad he put the most money into then was about his fight against utility monopolies in Ulster County.
In Alaska, Mary Peltola won her special election this summer, and is cruising to victory in the general election, in part because of the specter of Sarah Palin’s return to politics. But her slogan has been “pro-jobs, pro-fish, pro-family, and pro-choice,” and the fish refers to the need for the consolidated commercial fishing industry to offer better outcomes for workers, and to resist oil company efforts that would poison the marine environment.
In Minnesota, Attorney General Keith Ellison survived re-election by drawing a sharp contrast on white-collar crime. He touted his fights against the largest corporations in America and attacked his opponent for wanting to shut down corporate enforcement. Similarly, Josh Shapiro, who won resoundingly in Pennsylvania’s governor’s race, weaved into his messaging a number of fights against student loan companies, opioid manufacturers, and crooked contractors.
Across the country, in fact, Democrats ran against corporate power. They brought up Republican defenses of Big Oil, Big Pharma, and the gun lobby. They highlighted specific votes that exemplified this. It was not the sole contributing factor to electoral success, because nothing ever is. But it was a factor, and one overlooked by the punditocracy, among many of their mistakes.
Democrats certainly could have done more to highlight corporate power issues. At a national level, they came to it a little late, and in the Senate there could have been more votes to put Republicans on the record. But it was part of the firmament of this election, without question. And it turns out that aligning with voter beliefs—aligning with voters, in fact, over corporate villainy—is a good strategy.
