A coalition of left-leaning religious leaders met outside a Decatur Home Depot on Tuesday to call for a boycott of the Georgia-based company, claiming that it did not do enough to speak out against the state’s recently-passed elections law.
Why a home-improvement company should be responsible for weighing in on elections legislation is a bit unclear, but Gov. Brian Kemp immediately slammed the move, calling it “absolutely ridiculous” at a press conference later in the afternoon.
“First, the left came for baseball, and now, they are coming for Georgia jobs,” said Kemp from the Capitol rotunda. “This boycott of Home Depot – one of Georgia’s largest employers – puts partisan politics ahead of people’s paychecks. The Georgians hardest hit by this destructive decision are the hourly workers just trying to make ends meet during a global pandemic. I stand with Home Depot, and I stand with nearly 30,000 Georgians who work at the 90 Home Depot stores and 15 distribution centers across the Peach State. I will not apologize for supporting both Georgia jobs and election integrity.”
The ‘faith leaders,’ headed by Bishop Reginald T. Jackson of the Sixth Episcopal District of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, say that Home Depot (and other companies) have been “silent and indifferent” to the cries of voters who have been wronged by the elections legislation passed during the 2021 session. The resulting outcry saw other local companies including Delta and Home Depot decry the bill after it was passed, and Major League Baseball pulled its All-Star Game out of the state.
“We just don’t think we ought to let their indifference stand,” said Jackson Tuesday.
Home Depot has remained relatively apolitical over the years, though its two co-founders, Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank, have become major donors on opposite sides of the aisle. In fact the company donated more than 9,000 plexiglass dividers to polling stations across the state to help comply with COVID-19 requirements, and had 600 technology workers assist the state with technology issues related to the new voting machines. You could argue that few companies statewide did more to aid in Georgia’s elections process.
Perhaps wary of how Delta and Coke have been slammed by both sides for their late response to the drama, a spokeswoman Tuesday said that Home Depot would not respond directly to the boycott announcement, and wished only to “underscore” its commitment to voting.
“We’ve decided that the most appropriate approach for us to take is to continue to underscore our statement that all elections should be accessible, fair and secure,” said company spokeswoman Margaret Smith on Tuesday.
Indeed even Democratic leaders like Stacey Abrams have pushed back on the idea of boycotting local businesses in response to disagreements over legislation. Such a boycott would impact lower level employees first, and hardest, maybe not a great look for the party heading into a crucial 2022 midterm election season.
Higher level Dems are attacking the issue from a different front, with Abrams and Sen. Raphael Warnock on Tuesday testifying at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the need for federal election reform, which has the potential to reverse Georgia’s election laws entirely. Whether such legislation could pass and how much backlash there would be to it remains to be seen, but expect to hear a whole lot more about it in coming weeks. In any case it is a much headier debate than boycotting retail stores that don’t speak out on entirely unrelated elections bills.
