Fortune Archives: The GOP and Big Business: Friends or frenemies?

Known as the Gingrich Revolution, the 1994 Republican sweep of the U.S. House and Senate, as well as a slew of governorships and state legislatures, was a crushing rebuke to President Bill Clinton halfway through his first term.

That revolt by the party’s populist wing, championing Rep. Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” and backed by evangelicals, was subdued in the following years—the Republican pro-business traditionalist Bob Dole became the party’s presidential candidate in 1996, and lost his bid to unseat Clinton. But many now see in the Gingrich Revolution the seeds of the antiestablishment fervor that has since ascended within the GOP and buoyed President-elect Donald Trump twice to the White House.

One way to understand that strain in American Republicanism, the Fortune writer Richard I. Kirkland Jr. wrote in 1995, is as a break in the longtime alliance between the GOP and Big Business—and as a diminishment of the business world’s political influence. “Most of the current GOP partisans don’t actively hate, much less fear, big business,” he wrote of the 73 freshman Republican members in the 104th Congress. “They just feel contempt for it.”

Business leaders, for their part, had mixed feelings about the GOP’s 1995 agenda, wrote Kirkland (who went on to become Fortune’s managing editor). He cited a Fortune-commissioned survey of 204 large company CEOs, seven out of 10 of them identifying as Republicans. Most in that group were predictably eager to see a reduction in federal spending and government regulation, and wanted a tort reform bill. 

At the same time, they expressed strong skepticism about the hot-button “culture war” topics that the populist wing of the party was championing, such as allowing prayer in schools. Two-thirds said they were “somewhat” or “very” concerned about the religious right’s influence on the party. When it came to abortion, 59% of the chief executives were “adamantly” pro-choice.

“These go-nowhere issues, where one person tries to make his moral views the law of the land, are killers,” one CEO explained in a follow-up interview. “The people pushing them on either side are literally killing each other, and it’s not helping the country a bit.” 

Gary Bauer, then the president of the Christian conservative group the Family Research Council, saw “a real cultural disconnect between the FORTUNE 500 and social conservatives,” he told Kirkland, adding: “It mirrors the split in the GOP between country club Republicans and those of us whom they see as the great unwashed.”

In the three decades since, those tensions within the GOP have never gone away—and Trump, with his appeal to working-class economic insecurity and his personal unpredictability, has left Big Business unsure of what to expect in his second term. Kirkland’s analysis is worth revisiting as C-suite executives try to read the tea leaves.