Vance and Walz to speak at gathering of CEOs this week

Both presidential campaigns will be making their pitch this week to America’s business elite.

Ohio Sen. JD Vance and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz are both expected to address the Business Roundtable, a group that includes the CEOs of some of the largest U.S. corporations and the wielders of outsized economic clout that both candidates have assailed in the past.

Their appearances at the meeting in Washington, not yet announced publicly but confirmed by POLITICO, will give both campaigns a chance to secure support from powerful executives who could prove crucial in what polls still show to be an excruciatingly close race.

A Vance spokesperson said the Ohio senator will speak Thursday morning. A spokesperson for the Harris-Walz campaign declined to comment.

“Continuing our mission of engaging with policymakers on a bipartisan basis, we invited both Sen. Vance and Governor Walz to speak with CEOs at our September meeting, and we are pleased that both accepted,” said Business Roundtable spokesperson Michael Steel in a statement.

The CEO coalition originally invited Vice President Kamala Harris to speak at the quarterly meeting, according to a person familiar with the arrangements, granted anonymity to discuss private planning. But the campaign elected to send her running mate instead.

Harris is relatively unknown to many corporate interests in Washington, and her expedited presidential campaign has spent relatively little time courting corporate America, which is now rushing to understand her policies and build relationships with her orbit.

Business Roundtable’s favor could offer some political expediency to the next administration. The group includes the leaders of some of the country’s biggest corporations, including Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, and Apple CEO Tim Cook. It spends millions of dollars each quarter to lobby Washington, leveraging a small army of lobbyists of both political parties. Several of the companies involved with the group have worked closely with the federal government to propel the Biden administration’s agenda.

But the coalition can also be a thorn in an administration’s side: The group has at times presented obstacles to the Biden administration’s agenda, including when it worked to convince lawmakers to oppose President Joe Biden’s flagship Build Back Better bill.

The CEOs have already heard from former President Donald Trump, who in June spoke with the group and pledged his opposition to taxes on tips and support for lowering the corporate tax rate.

For Walz, the gig will be a chance at a new first impression of sorts. The Minnesota Democrat has not worked in Washington for years, and his roots as a schoolteacher and veteran are a far cry from the corporate elite that will hear him talk later this week.

Vance, meanwhile, spent a significant portion of his professional career among big businesspeople. He worked as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley for billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel and then a firm run by former AOL CEO Steve Case, before starting his own firm and subsequently running for Senate.

Vance is also not a stranger to Business Roundtable gatherings, and he has cast one of its events as a formative moment in his political evolution. He described to The New York Times being invited in 2018 to one of the group’s events, at which he sat next to a hotel CEO who complained about having to pay workers more money.

“The fact that this guy saw me as sympathetic to his problem, and not the problem of the workers, made me realize that I’m on a train that has its own momentum and I have to get off this train,” Vance told the Times.