Sports leagues have made the foolish decision to get into politics.
The Democrat establishment is turning the screws on businesses to do its bidding.
And Major League Baseball’s failed political protest could backfire in a major way.
Joe Biden and the Democrats have been howling that voter ID laws are “Jim Crow on steroids.”
It’s an absurd argument to believe that black people can’t obtain an ID, especially when one is required for nearly everything as an adult.
The Democrats seem terribly concerned about Republican efforts to combat voter fraud, and they’ve cudgeled big business into enforcing policies they can’t get passed legislatively.
The most recent example came when the Democrats bullied Major League Baseball to move its all-star game out of Georgia as a way to punish the Republican state legislature for passing the new voting law (which is still less restrictive than the voting laws in Delaware, Biden’s home state).
The MLB moved the game to Denver, Colorado—a state with stricter voting laws than Georgia and a much smaller black population.
The MLB’s decision backfired spectacularly, and now there could be legal ramifications.
From Breitbart:
“The Job Creators Network (JCN), a conservative group representing small businesses, plans to file a lawsuit against MLB and their Players Union in hopes of forcing the league to return the game to Atlanta or compensate the Atlanta businesses impacted by the league’s decision to leave due to Georgia’s voter reform laws.”
Thanks to the MLB’s foolish decision, local Atlanta businesses lost over $100 million in expected revenue.
Hopefully those Georgians remember that when they go to the polls.
The Democrats realized they made a mistake and Biden, Senator Raphael Warnock, and boycott ring leader Stacey Abrams all distanced themselves from the move.
Ken Blackwell, former mayor of Cincinnati and minority owner of the Cincinnati Reds, said during an interview:
“The plaintiffs in this lawsuit are asking for the All-Star Game to be returned to Atlanta, and that’s what I would want to see…Let Atlanta businesses and workers just reap the economic rewards of tens of millions dollars from the game, and let Major League Baseball show the country that we’re not going to jump through the hoops of the radical left in their never-ending race to the bottom to see who is the most woke…What we need to do is just focus, as a league, on playing a sport that Americans love and running a successful business in the process, that would be a win-win for everyone, and that’s what I want, a win for everyone.”
Unfortunately for sports fans, professional sports leagues seem intent on vexing their base with progressive messaging.
Perhaps the only way that changes is sports leagues fear economic backlash the way they fear public relations backlash from the Left’s media class.
The MLB needs to understand that alienating half the country is a terrible business model, especially when appeasing the Left brings in no new supporters.
