Woke CEOs mocked conservatives. Now the joke’s on them.

Corporate America is bending to conservatives’ market influence. Not out of sudden ideological sympathy, but because conservatives have more economic power than the left — and they’ve stopped pretending not to notice.

For years, corporations ignored conservative concerns. Worse, they often went out of their way to antagonize them, stripping away team mascots like the Redskins and Indians, embracing diversity quotas, and saturating entertainment with left-wing tropes. The squeaky wheel got the grease, and the left made all the noise.

Free markets punish bad bets more effectively than Washington ever could. Let them.

Conservatives, meanwhile, were taken for granted. Corporate leaders assumed they would keep buying no matter how many insults were thrown their way. For a long time, they were right.

That ended when conservatives started fighting back. Bud Light’s Dylan Mulvaney stunt turned into a disaster. Victoria’s Secret collapsed under its “new image” campaign. Cracker Barrel’s woke makeover backfired so badly its chairs stopped rocking. And when employees mocked Charlie Kirk’s assassination, corporations finally began to realize that “the customer is always right” still applies.

Numbers don’t lie

Corporations aren’t embracing conservatives because they’ve had a change of heart. They’re doing it because they need to survive.

The 2024 election was a wake-up call: Conservative voters outnumbered liberals 35% to 23%. Add moderates, and non-liberals outnumbered liberals more than three to one.

Conservatives overwhelmingly vote Republican. Ninety percent cast ballots for Trump. Pew data shows a majority of middle- and upper-middle-income Americans lean Republican — and 51% of Americans identify as middle class. That’s a lot of disposable income.

Family size makes the math even stronger. The Institute for Family Studies reports that counties where Trump won big also have higher birth rates: 1.76 compared to the national average of 1.63. Harris counties, by contrast, averaged just 1.37. Republicans also want bigger families: half want three or more kids, compared to only 31% of Democrats.

Bigger families and higher incomes mean bigger market clout. And the left’s most extreme advocates — the loudest drivers of corporate wokeness — are a small minority inside an already shrinking ideological bloc.

Why the shift happened

So why did corporations bow to the left for so long? Two reasons.

First, executives themselves lean left. Pew Research found upper-income Americans tilt Democrat, and CEOs have marched steadily leftward over the last two decades. Second, conservatives tolerated it. They didn’t punish woke messaging, making it appear costless for companies to indulge their leadership’s politics.

That illusion is gone. Conservative consumers are awake. And companies are finally capitulating to reality.

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Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Don’t let government ruin it

This is why Republicans should resist the urge to meddle. FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr made a mistake threatening ABC over Jimmy Kimmel. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way”? Let’s not.

That kind of government action obscures the real shift — a market correction, not a political one.

Markets speak louder than regulators. If conservatives let economics do the work, corporations will continue adjusting out of necessity. But if government steps in, companies will chalk the change up to political coercion, not consumer demand, and drift back toward the left as soon as administrations change.

Already the left is trying to spin it that way, casting Jimmy Kimmel as a martyr for “free expression” instead of what he is: a bad business decision. The left wants companies to believe government, not consumers, forced the pivot.

Conservatives know better. Free markets punish bad bets more effectively than Washington. Let them.