This week, Vice President Kamala Harris explicitly reached out to business leaders with a major economic address in Pittsburgh—and new polling results show growing support for the Harris-Walz ticket among CEOs.
As we previously wrote for TIME, polling data from approximately 60 top CEOs in attendance at our Yale CEO Caucus this month reveals that business leaders are increasingly optimistic about the economy.
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But what is even more revealing is what these polling results show about how CEOs are thinking about politics. While some of the top line results have been previously covered by the New York Times and CNN, among others, we are revealing here, for the first time, the full set of results.
Across a group of CEOs that had no discernible partisan leaning (37% of our respondents self-identified as Republican, 32% identified as Democratic, and 32% identified as independents) the polling revealed that 80% of CEOs surveyed expect Harris to win, and only 20% expect former President Donald Trump to win.
This is the most lopsided vote we’ve ever had, after informally asking this same “who do you expect to win” question of our Yale CEO Caucus every presidential election year over the last several cycles. While our straw poll in both prior presidential elections, in 2016 and 2020, revealed CEOs were expecting Trump to lose both times, the margin was far less than 80-20.
Read more: Kamala Harris Rolled Out An Ambitious Economic Plan. Here’s What’s In It
Furthermore, while CEOs expected Trump to lose every time he has been on the ballot, that marked a significant break from longstanding CEO prediction bias toward Republicans—making the predictions for Harris all the more noteworthy. Previously, CEOs had expected George W. Bush to win both times he was on the ballot, and the CEOs slightly favored Mitt Romney’s chances over incumbent President Barack Obama in 2012.
What our polling results also revealed is that most business leaders, across parties, are by and large horrified by Trump’s leadership model and his incendiary rhetoric. Fully 87% of our respondents believe Trump should apologize for false statements about Haitian immigrants in Ohio abducting and eating pets, and 94% of respondents believe hate speech is inciting increasing political violence. Furthermore, when asked, “is either candidate a threat to democracy,” 73% of our respondents picked Trump, while 4% picked Harris, 8% said both, and 15% said neither.
The polling data also reaffirmed CEOs’ substantive disagreement with Trump’s proposed economic policy platform, with several expressing concerns that Trump would undermine Fed independence while pitting business leaders against each other and reigniting inflationary pressures. In particular, CEOs expressed nuanced opposition to Trump’s proposed universal 10% tariffs. While 56% of CEOs believe we need to protect vital U.S. industries from unfair foreign competition through tariffs, they distinguished between protecting against genuinely unfair foreign competition and all-tariffs-all-the-time. Some CEOs also expressed skepticism that tariffs should be an end goal in and of themselves, believing that the threat of tariffs is far more effective than the real thing.
CEOs expressed their opposition to not only protectionism but also isolationism. Several CEOs reiterated their beliefs that access to global markets and free trade depend on the U.S. being a reliable, trustworthy participant in the international community, and the need to continue supporting Ukraine in its fight for freedom.
This fresh polling data from our Yale CEO Caucus, which is consistent with prior reports that not a single top 100 CEO is supporting Trump this election cycle, reaffirms that the message from Corporate America heading into the presidential election is loud and clear: they overwhelmingly believe that Harris is a trustworthy, patriotic, stable leader and a constructive problem solver, even if they do not agree with her on all fronts. CEOs are not isolationist, not protectionist, and not xenophobes, and they depend upon the rule of law and want a President who respects that rule of law. After seeing how the first Trump term drove wedges between corporate constituents, as he shredded the harmonious fabric of American life, the choice for them is clear.
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