“Republicans buy sneakers, too.”
Those famous words came from Michael Jordan, widely regarded as the greatest basketball player of all time. He was also the athlete most responsible for transforming Nike from a shoe company into a global sports empire.
Jordan made the comment during the 1990 U.S. Senate race in North Carolina, after his mother urged him to support Democratic candidate Harvey Gantt and record a public-service announcement. Jordan confirmed in ESPN’s “The Last Dance” that he made the remark jokingly on a team bus.
Maybe so. But the line endured because it captured a basic business lesson in four words. Republicans buy shoes. Democrats buy shoes. Most companies benefit when both groups want to buy theirs.
Nike stopped listening.
After spending much of the past decade injecting left-wing politics into its brand, Nike is now set to be removed from the S&P 100, ending a run of nearly 18 years in the blue-chip index. S&P Dow Jones Indices announced the move Friday, and Nike will come out before trading begins Sept. 21.
S&P isn’t kicking Nike out because the index committee hated the Kaepernick ad or saw Dylan Mulvaney in a sports bra. Nike is getting kicked out because its value collapsed.
The politics didn’t wipe out $200 billion by itself. But Nike volunteered to alienate customers while it was already losing ground everywhere else.
The sports apparel giant reached a market value of approximately $281 billion near its November 2021 peak. Nike shares closed Tuesday at $38.10, giving the company a market capitalization of roughly $56.5 billion. The stock was about 79% below its Nov. 5, 2021 intraday record of $179.10, and more than $220 billion in market value had disappeared.
Getting removed from the S&P 100 won’t put Nike out of business. It will still sell billions of dollars in shoes and sign some of the biggest athletes in the world.
But Nike used to look untouchable. Now it’s worth about one-fifth of what it was five years ago and no longer has a spot in one of America’s premier blue-chip indexes.
China is where this story gets really good.
Nike made Colin Kaepernick the face of its 30th-anniversary “Just Do It” campaign after he refused to stand for the national anthem, saying he wouldn’t show pride in a country that “oppresses Black people and people of color.”
Nike apparently thought that was a message worth putting on billboards across America.
Contrast that with how the company publicly talked about China.
In 2021, Nike faced backlash from Chinese consumers after the company expressed concern about reports of forced labor involving Uyghurs in Xinjiang. During an earnings call a few months later, then-CEO John Donahoe made Nike’s priorities clear.
“We’re a brand of China and for China,” Donahoe said.
Quite a difference, isn’t it? Nike had plenty to say about oppression when the target was the United States. But when the company’s business in an actual communist country came under pressure, its CEO reminded everyone that Nike had been investing there for more than 40 years, operated thousands of stores and remained committed to the Chinese market.
Nike was perfectly willing to embrace anti-American messaging at home while continuing to grow in China by assuring Chinese consumers that the company was “of China and for China.”
It didn’t work.
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When Donahoe made that declaration in 2021, Nike generated $8.29 billion in Greater China. Five years later, that number is down to $5.85 billion. Nearly 30% of the business disappeared, including an 11% drop in the past year.
So much for being “of China and for China.”
In 2019, Nike pulled a Fourth of July-themed Air Max sneaker featuring the Betsy Ross flag because it said the design could “unintentionally offend.” A year later, the company launched its “For Once, Don’t Do It” racial-justice campaign and publicly embraced Black Lives Matter messaging.
Then Nike partnered with Dylan Mulvaney in 2023 for a paid promotion of women’s leggings and sports bras. Also, OutKick reported that researchers and a Boston Children’s Hospital publication had described Nike as supporting a proposed study involving transgender youth athletes. A Nike executive, speaking to OutKick on background, later said the study “was never initialized” and was “not moving forward,” while researcher Joanna Harper subsequently said Nike had pulled out after critics learned of it.
Nike made left-wing politics part of its identity and repeatedly dared customers to object.
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Now Nike is leaving the S&P 100, its stock is down nearly 80% from its peak and its executives are trying to rebuild the product innovation and marketplace relationships that once made the company dominant.
Michael Jordan understood that Republicans buy sneakers, too.
He also understood something Nike forgot: They don’t have to buy yours.
