Major companies have come out in criticism of Georgia’s new voter-suppression law that makes it harder to vote, especially in the urban areas. As companies headquartered in Georgia like Coca-Cola and Delta slammed the law for being “based on a lie” and President Joe Biden calling the law “Jim Crow on steroids,” Major League Baseball has chosen to move this season’s All-Star Game out of Atlanta, resulting in Republicans, who have rallied against “cancel culture,” calling on people to boycott MLB.
The decision to pull the July 13 game, one of the largest baseball events in the U.S., is the first substantial corporate backlash against Georgia over concerns regarding the voter suppression bill.
After substantial lobbying from civil rights groups, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred announced Friday that this year’s All-Star Game is no longer being held in Atlanta. A new location for the game has not yet been determined.
“I have decided that the best way to demonstrate our values as a sport is by relocating this year’s All-Star Game and MLB draft,” said Manfred in a statement. “Major League Baseball fundamentally supports voting rights for all Americans and opposes restrictions to the ballot box.”
The White House announced its support for the MLB decision even before it happened. Biden said that the new law was akin to “Jim Crow on steroids,” and said on Wednesday, two days before the decision was announced, that he would “strongly support” relocation of the baseball game.
Major executives from more than 100 companies nationwide, including Target, Snapchat, Uber, PayPal, and Reddit signed a statement criticizing the passage of the bill. Coca-Cola and Delta Air Lines, two of the largest companies headquartered in Georgia both harshly criticized the law for suppressing the vote.
Democratic Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said that though Atlanta will suffer economically from the decision to not host the game there, she nevertheless supports the decision, saying that state Republicans needed to “renounce the terrible damage they have caused to our voting system and the harm they have inflicted on our economy.”
Despite this, and the fact that many national Democrats are in support, other local Democrats opposed the move, saying that it would harm hotels and local businesses more than the state Republicans. State Rep. Teri Anulewicz, who represents the district which includes the stadium the game was originally scheduled to be played in, said, “I don’t know who Major League Baseball feels they are punishing. The governor, from his statement, has made clear he doesn’t feel he is being punished.”
The sweeping Georgia law is just one of many being considered by Republican legislatures across the country since Donald Trump’s defeat last November. Republicans have blamed “voter fraud” as the reason why Trump lost, and are pushing voter-suppression measures as well as measures intended to allow partisan legislatures to practically overturn the results of an election, in response.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican who signed the bill into law, denounced the decision, saying that the league “caved to fear, political opportunism, and liberal lies,” and that he would not back down. He called it a “knee-jerk decision” and said that the “attack” on Georgia “is the direct result of repeated likes from Joe Biden and Stacey Abrams about a bill that expands access to the ballot box and ensures the integrity of an election.” The bill in question criminalizes giving voters waiting in line to vote any food or water, adds strict identification requirements for voting by mail, limits the use of absentee ballot drop boxes, and allows partisan groups to take over the overseeing of elections.
However, it is so far unclear whether or not strongly restricting the use of absentee ballots will reduce turnout going forward. Absentee voting was largely embraced by the Democratic Party in 2020 due to COVID-19, but the pandemic is going to disappear by 2022. Analysis has shown that efforts to make it easier or harder to vote have little effect on turnout, and such laws may further galvanize Democratic voters to turn out in full force in protest.
Stacey Abrams, a Georgia voting rights advocate, said she was disappointed that the baseball game would no longer be held in Georgia but she said she “commends the players, owners, and League commissioner for speaking out,” saying that people “should not abandon the victims of GOP malice and lies.” Abrams said the Republican legislature knew of the economic risks passing the bill would have, yet chose to do so anyway. “They prioritized making it harder for people of color to vote over the economic well-being of all Georgians.”
Such a boycott by sports leagues and businesses is not unprecedented in U.S. history. In 2017, the Republican legislature in North Carolina passed a bill restricting bathroom use for transgender people. In protest, the NCAA and NBA moved scheduled games out of the state, while large companies like PayPal and Deutsche Bank chose to reverse plans to expand in the state. Singers, such as Bruce Springsteen, canceled concerts in the state. Ultimately, the “bathroom bill” cost the state at least $3.76 billion in lost business, and the Republican legislature ultimately rescinded the bill.
In a statement, Trump called on his supporters to boycott companies speaking out in favor of voting rights and caving to “woke cancel culture.”
“It is finally time for Republicans and Conservatives to fight back—we have more people than they do—by far! Boycott Major League Baseball, Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, JPMorgan Chase, ViacomCBS, Citigroup, Cisco, UPS, and Merck,” Trump said in a statement. “Don’t go back to their products until they relent. We can play the game better than them.”
Some critics of Trump said online that by boycotting those companies, they were also participating in cancel culture themselves, and said it was hypocritical that Trump and Republicans were denouncing cancel culture while simultaneously encouraging it.