In 2016, my political outreach company, Firehouse Phones, worked on the presidential campaign of a democratic socialist. It was one of many campaigns my firm touched, but that one stays on my resume for a reason: it taught me more about how persuasion actually works than any client engagement before or since.
Today I run Ohio River South, a government affairs firm focused on the nation's fastest growing region — the American South. Over the past decade we've advocated for nearly two dozen Fortune 500 companies — Amazon in my earlier lobbying years, and later growing a client roster that included Alphabet, Microsoft, General Motors, United Healthcare, and Capital One. So when democratic socialists started winning and companies started calling to ask what it meant for them, I found myself in a useful position: I'm the advisor who has been on the other team.
Here is the read I give corporate leadership — and the to-do list that follows from it.
Start with a clear-eyed definition, because the confusion is doing half the damage. Democratic socialists are not proposing that the government seize your company. They want the basics working people struggle to buy on the market — housing, health care, child care, transit, utilities — provided or guaranteed publicly, and they want to get there by winning elections. That's the descriptive half. Here's the other half, and boardrooms should take it seriously: the program includes rent freezes and expanded rent regulation, campaigns for publicly owned power, higher taxes on corporations and high earners, aggressive labor standards, and open hostility to the incentive packages that anchor corporate site selection. Mamdani's first hundred days show both the capacity and the limits — a childcare deal struck with Albany, a signature fare-free bus plan stalled for lack of state funding. No, this is not the Comintern, and companies that treat it that way end up negotiating with a caricature while the actual organizers register voters in their host county. But it is a disciplined movement whose agenda touches your rate base, your rent rolls, your labor costs, and your next incentive vote.
Next, size the exposure precisely — it's operational, not existential. The agenda lands on specific line items: rent regulation where you hold residential assets, public-power campaigns where you're the utility — or the data center driving its load growth — state-level corporate tax proposals, labor standards, and organized opposition to the subsidy deals that used to sail through commissions on a Tuesday afternoon. What changes for most companies is process. Entitlements take longer. Incentive votes draw opposition that shows up with spreadsheets. Community benefits agreements move from exotic to expected. None of that is fatal to a project — all of it is priceable, the way you price currency or interest-rate risk. The companies that fall behind in this moment aren't the ones facing the strongest opposition; they're the ones that mistook a priceable operating condition for an existential threat, and either overpaid in panic or stalled in denial.
Then run the affirmative playbook. What this movement does well reduces to a discipline any company can copy: show up, listen, and give people a way to say yes. In practice, five moves. Map political exposure the way you map rate exposure — every jurisdiction where a permit, variance, rate decision, or incentive vote is coming in the next twenty-four months, and who organizes there. Build presence before you need it: fund the rec league, join the community development corporation, be a known quantity two years before you're an applicant. When opposition forms, engage early and without lawyers, and send an operator with authority to trade rather than a spokesperson with talking points. Price a community benefits agreement honestly against the alternative — eighteen months of entitlement war, a moratorium, a ballot question with your project's name on it — and treat signing one as procurement, not surrender. And look inside your own walls: the under-35 cohort that now tells Gallup it prefers socialism to capitalism is also your junior workforce and your customer base. Build the same listening discipline internally — the company that hears its own people early is rarely ambushed in public. One more, for the board: political risk belongs on the enterprise risk register next to cyber and currency — reviewed quarterly, owned by an executive, not delegated to a PR retainer.
Finally, expect this everywhere you operate — not just where the headlines are. The temptation is to file this as a coastal story. It isn't. The energy travels wherever affordability bites, and it has already arrived in the region absorbing the corporate migration: the South — hundreds of relocated headquarters, the Battery Belt, a data-center buildout worth tens of billions in Georgia alone, in what my firm's new report, Accelerating South, documents as the country's largest economy and its least settled electorate. Atlanta seated its first democratic-socialist council member in January. Carrboro, North Carolina elected another. And the same energy shows up in Southern county commissions without the label — data-center moratoria, utility-rate revolts, anti-subsidy backlashes that cross party lines. A company could once dismiss a Brooklyn assembly race as somebody else's politics. It cannot dismiss the city council seating its next zoning vote.
People ask how I square the two halves of my resume. Honestly: I've stopped treating them as halves. The Bernie campaign fell short of the nomination — but it reached people the system had stopped hearing, and the organizing craft it modeled is exactly what's winning elections today. My corporate practice is, at its best, the discipline of making institutions listen before they're forced to. The failure mode on both sides is the same — mistaking your own talking points for the public's actual concerns — and so is the fix.
The democratic socialists are having their moment because they mastered a discipline the rest of American politics let atrophy. The companies that navigate it best won't be the loudest critics or the quietest bystanders. They'll be the ones that learned the same discipline — before the next rate case, the next site-selection fight, the next election in a county where they just bet a billion dollars. The people across the table learned to organize. The question is whether you did.
Howard Franklin is the founder and CEO of Ohio River South, a government affairs and political-risk firm that works across the South from offices in Atlanta and Washington, D.C.
