Southpaw 22: The Billionaire Gambit
Can a progressive, son of a billionaire, 33-year-old Milwaukee Bucks executive win a Senate race in Wisconsin?
Dear Readers,
Welcome to Southpaw #22! Back in October, in one of our early editions, we published a newsletter we titled WNBA players are trying to oust their owner from the Senate, and it might just work. As you may know, it did. The Atlanta Dream’s backing of Reverend Warnock propelled him to a victory over their owner, Kelly Loeffler, and Warnock is now serving as a U.S. Senator. It got us thinking about the relationship between sports figures and electoral politics—while there’s a long history of protest in sports, there’s a less rich history of athletes getting involved in electoral politics. The Dream changed this, and now a Milwaukee Bucks (NBA) executive named Alex Lasry has declared his intention to run for Senate in Wisconsin. Southpaw will be tracking Lasry’s campaign closely—think of this week’s blog as something of an introduction to Lasry and the race. So, while we always love to hear your feedback, we would especially like to hear where you would like our coverage of Lasry to go from here. Are you curious about his early life? A deep dive into his job with the Bucks? A look at the minutiae of his campaign videos? Let us know either in the comments or in an email.
-Ian and Calder
Can Alex Lasry’s Contradictions—Progressive, Son of a Billionaire, Milwaukee Bucks Executive—Propel Him to Victory?
As a general rule, sports executives and progressives do not make happy electoral bedfellows. The 2020 election cycle alone featured numerous reports of sports owners and executives using their significant wealth to support arch-conservative candidates and reactionary causes. According to a USA TODAY report, of the $14.6 million that principal owners and managing partners of the U.S.’s 161 major professional teams donated to federal candidates and causes during the election cycle, 86% went to Republican entities. As John Gonzalez wrote in The Ringer last September, “It’s hardly news that billionaires who own sports teams donate heavily to politicians and their political action committees, and it’s no surprise that the overwhelming amount of that money is earmarked for conservatives and their causes.”
Enter Alex Lasry. On Wednesday, Lasry, a 33-year-old senior vice president in the Milwaukee Bucks organization, announced he would seek the Democratic nomination for Wisconsin’s open Senate seat in 2022. The race will fill the seat currently occupied by stalwart Trump-defender and insurrection-doubter Ron Johnson. (Johnson, now in his second term, has not announced if he will seek reelection.) Lasry joins former Outagamie County executive Tom Nelson in the Democratic field for what is shaping up to be one of the most hotly-contested Senate races of 2022.
On his face, Lasry fits the bill of the typical sports-executive-turned-politician. The son of Bucks owner and hedge-fund billionaire Marc Lasry, Lasry the younger was born in New York City and attended an elite prep school before earning his bachelor's degree at the University of Pennsylvania and his M.B.A. from the Stern School of Business at NYU. In between his degrees, he spent three years as a low-level aide in the Obama White House, where he worked for Valerie Jarrett, a senior Obama aide who made her millions in real estate. After completing his MBA in 2014, he moved to Milwaukee—a city he had no previous connection to—to assume a senior executive position in the Bucks organization, which his father had purchased that year for $550 million. To date, the totality of his political experience in the state comes from his successful stewardship of Milwaukee’s bid to host the 2020 Democratic National Convention, for which he subsequently served as finance chair. With this one minor achievement under his belt, he now fancies himself the best candidate to represent the people of the Great State of Wisconsin, which, until recently, he had never visited.
Lasry is betting that his status as a sports-person can give him the bump that he needs to win the primary. Unlike many of his sports-executive political predecessors, though, Lasry is running as an unapologetic progressive. In a video announcing his campaign, Lasry hits on all the big-ticket progressive priorities: ensuring economic justice, cracking down on corporate malfeasance, championing workers, combating police brutality, advancing racial justice, and protecting the environment. The video featured endorsements from local community activists and labor leaders as well as big-name Wisconsin Democrats like Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley and Milwaukee Common Council President Cavalier Johnson. Some of Lasry’s rhetoric could be borrowed straight from a Bernie Sanders rally: “We need a new way of thinking and a new perspective,” Lasry says in a clip at the beginning of the video. “We’ve lived through three systemic shocks to the system over the last twenty years—9/11, the Great Recession, and now this pandemic—and we still haven’t fixed things.”
With lines like these, it’s easy to forget that Lasry is himself a corporate executive and the heir to a billion-dollar fortune. But if the rest of the video offers any indication, Lasry will make his unorthodox management of the Bucks organization a central part of his pitch to voters. The video highlights Lasry’s efforts to engage the greater-Milwaukee community in the project to build the Bucks’ new Fiserv Forum, which opened in 2018 with the highest level of LEED certification of any stadium in the U.S. It also showcases multiple photos of Lasry marching with players and local activists in racial justice protests this past summer, fist raised in solidarity. The announcement is peppered with testimonials from “The Common Man,” including a construction worker who helped build Fiserv Forum and an LGBTQ activist who has partnered with the Bucks organization.
All this raises a massive question mark—do Lasry’s progressive statements line up with his actions? Of course, self-styled progressive billionaires with grand political ambitions are not new and rarely do they successfully realize those ambitions. (See: Steyer, Tom; Schultz, Howard.) Lasry’s opponent, Tom Nelson, has already challenged him not to spend any of his personal or family money on his campaign, a pledge to which Lasry has not agreed. As the Democratic field grows, his opponents will likely continue to press him—rightly—on the sources of his campaign funds and his lack of political experience or personal roots in the state. Lasry already committed his first major gaffe by publicizing that he and his wife had received the COVID vaccine before they officially became eligible (though they appear to have taken vaccines that would have otherwise gone to waste, not a problem in our eyes).
Lasry is the rare billionaire involved with sports whose political ambitions lean left. He is hoping that this unique position can help him overcome his political liabilities. By positioning himself first and foremost as a progressive sports figure, Lasry appears to be leaning heavily on a growing electoral alliance between progressive candidates and professional athletes— what we’re calling “the Dream Effect,” named for the Atlanta Dream’s unprecedented campaign in support of Raphael Warnock during Georgia’s recent Senate run-off election.
Though the Dream offered the most dramatic instance of professional athletes boosting a progressive candidate’s electoral chances, left-leaning athletes around the country have grown more emboldened in their public support for political candidates, especially in national elections. By a margin of 2-1, Democratic sports fans say they support athletes' right to endorse political candidates, and some preliminary research suggests that celebrity athletes’ endorsements can shape voting behavior and drive voter turnout, especially among historically low-turnout constituencies like young Black voters.
With this background in mind, Lasry’s candidacy presents an interesting test case: will the Bucks’ players follow the Dream's example and publicly support Lasry, or will they decide to stay above the fray? Of course, the two cases are not identical: the Dream were campaigning against their reviled owner, while the Bucks would be campaigning in support of theirs. We can find some clues, though, in the NBA wildcat strike, which the Bucks led last summer. Lasry, once again, played a complex role. To his credit, he managed to set up a call between the Bucks players and Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul, one of the players’ chief demands when they began their work stoppage. However, after Lasry originally reached out to Kaul and didn’t hear back, someone in the Bucks locker room leaked to the press that they were waiting for a call from Kaul before agreeing to play. Lasry, who had been in text contact with Kaul and his staff, let them know that he had just scolded the players for leaking their intentions to the media.
The incident shows why it might be easier for players to throw a full-throated endorsement behind a candidate like Warnock, working to unseat their owner, than behind one of their bosses. Lasry is attempting to walk the thin line between being a relatable, progressive man-of-the-people and the white-collar son of a billionaire: he wants to appear like he supports the players while also retaining the ability to scold them when they do social justice the wrong way. We don’t know the current state of Lasry’s relationship with the Bucks, but he’ll have to work hard to earn their support.
All of that said, Wisconsin’s Senate race is looking like it will achieve Georgia-2020 levels of insanity. Will Lasry limp along as another failed progressive billionaire a la Tom Steyer or Howard Schultz, or will he pick up where Warnock and Jon Ossoff left off? The difference, once again, could be the athletes.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about . . .
. . . how changes to the NCAA name, image, likeness (NIL) rules could help HBCUs attract more talent? “HBCUs are landing top recruits—but systemic change requires something more,” by Kevin Blackistone in The Washington Post, February 14, 2021.
. . . why Fernando Tatis Jr.’s megadeal seems icky—but actually isn’t? “The Fernando Tatis Jr. extension feels wrong, but that’s what’s great about it,” by Marc Normandin (February 20, 2021).
. . . Rush Limbaugh’s failed bid to buy an NFL team? “When Rush Limbaugh Was Too Racist for The NFL,” by Dave Zirin in The Nation (February 19, 2021).
. . . the Tokyo Olympic’s last-minute 180? “After Leader’s Sexist Remarks, Tokyo Olympics Makes Symbolic Shift,” by Motoko Rich in The New York Times (February 18, 2021).