As the Election Draws Near, New Sectors are Trying their Hands at Lobbying

Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t just made gold chains fashionable, he’s trendified lobbying too.

Data on political lobbying collected by nonprofit OpenSecrets shows that while the usual suspects are steadily spending more money on lobbying, specific and quite new industries are diving in headfirst.

Let’s All Go to the Lobby

Lobbying overall in the US has been making a comeback over the past six years, Dan Auble, a senior researcher at OpenSecrets, told The Daily Upside, adding that usually companies ramp up spending in the face of specific policy issues. “For instance, social media regulation is not something that a lot [of policymaking] has actually happened around. But as soon as people start talking about that issue, those companies start spending more money,” he said. According to OpenSecrets’ data the top individual company by lobbying spending so far this year is Meta.

But while large Big Tech companies like Meta have a pretty established presence on Capitol Hill, other tech or tech-adjacent sectors are starting to kick their lobbying efforts into fifth gear: 

• A number of fintech companies including PayPal, Block Inc (the company behind Cash App) and Early Warning Services (the company behind Zelle) spent record amounts on lobbying in the first half of this year, according to OpenSecrets. Auble said five years ago, some fintech companies didn’t lobby at all, so it’s a big shift in behavior.
• The vacation rental sector is also stepping up its lobbying spend, probably in response to crackdowns on short-term rentals in cities like New York. In H2 of this year vacation rental companies overall spent 13% more than in the same period last year, but for some the rise was more dramatic: Expedia spent 58% more than in the same period last year, and Booking Holdings spent 61% more. 

The one outlier in the vacation rental space is Airbnb, the poster child for problematic rentals, whose spending was down 29% compared to last year.

A Window into History: Auble said that the lobbying playbook provided by Big Tech firms means nascent industries are getting into lobbying much quicker. “Some of these newer industries are jumping in in a big way much earlier,” he said. “Internet and social media companies came out of nowhere and started spending a lot on lobbying, maybe learning lessons from what Microsoft did or did not do back in the ‘80s and ‘90s,” he said, adding that Microsoft took a hands off approach which came back in the form of antitrust issues. Auble added that really big lobbying spends tend to come after elections, rather than before, once companies know which administration they’re dealing with. So if sectors are setting records this year, who knows how much they’ll shell out come January…