Jerry Bowyer provides a program that allows investors to gain better control over how their shares are used in investor votes on conservative issues.
The Nation
How one family aims to break libs' corporate voting power
By Jeff Green Bloomberg
Published Sept. 15, 2025
Jerry Bowyer provides a program that allows investors to gain better control over how their shares are used in investor votes on conservative issues.
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Roughly 400 miles from Wall Street in a small town in Pennsylvania's Rust Belt, Jerry Bowyer, his wife and five of their children have been working around a dining room table, sifting through corporate data on hot-button issues such as abortion, DEI and climate change.
Their goal: Shift more power to conservative investors at company annual meetings. And, with the 2025 proxy season kicking into gear this month, there are signs that the Bowyers are winning some converts.
Institutional Shareholder Services Inc., which influences how millions of shares are voted each year, offers Bowyer Research's guidelines among its categories for voting. Egan Jones, another advisory firm, is doing the same for the first time this year.
State-run funds in Republican-led Texas, Louisiana and Wyoming also are users of Bowyer Research. The $57 billion Texas Permanent School Fund was the first state fund to sign up.
The Texas fund needs to vote its shares "in the interest of the people we serve," said Chair Tom Maynard, explaining why it uses Bowyer Research. It isn't going to be a "silver bullet," but it's another way to counter activism from the left, he said in an interview.
The Bowyers see their main attraction as providing a program that allows investors to gain better control over how their shares are used in investor votes on conservative issues. These include rejecting proposals that promote climate-related initiatives and supporting those that fight religious discrimination and debanking.
"It's this family business in the home, but we're represented in high places and we're listened to by state officials," said Bowyer, who founded Bowyer Research in 2013 with his wife Susan, who is also the chief operating officer.
What's at stake may seem nerdy and arcane, but it's nonetheless important in helping set corporate priorities. US securities law requires publicly traded companies to have an annual meeting to allow shareholders to pass muster on their business. Thousands of fund managers cast billions of votes on behalf of millions of investors on issues ranging from what executives get paid to resolutions that seek additional environmental and societal-related disclosures.
Conservative-leaning groups like the Bowyer's want to match the sway that progressives have historically had. Currently, resolutions opposing diversity, equity and inclusion programs struggle to attract more than 2% support from shareholders.
From Bowyer's standpoint, that's because liberal causes have dominated the annual proxy season for most of the past 40 years. There have been few options for conservative investors to vote their beliefs, he said. The election of President Donald Trump is almost certain to change the equation.
"We're talking to companies and we're seeing a vibe shift from a thorough commitment to ESG and DEI standards - at least in public - to a real willingness to reconsider these positions," Bowyer said. "They now know they are under a lot of scrutiny from the administration on ESG and DEI stuff."
Andy Puzder, a longtime critic of the voting power of giant asset managers such as BlackRock Inc., and Trump's pick as the ambassador to the European Union, devotes a whole chapter to Bowyer's system in his 2024 book on the topic. Bowyer's guidelines offer a "shareholder first option" and present an alternative for those "who want an abundant and promising future - and don't want their monies used to threaten our democracy, economic freedom or individual liberty," Puzder wrote.
Bowyer said he started out life as a socialist, influenced by his grandfather, a machinist who owned a bar in Easton, Pennsylvania, and had a library of socialist tomes. After reading the communist manifesto in high school and finding it too depressing, he switched to Catholic writers such as Thomas Aquinas and faith had an increasing influence over his rightward shift.
His first job out of college was as an accountant, and he also worked as an economist and for an actuary. He did a stint in Christian broadcasting and also appeared on CNBC to discuss economics. Conservative philanthropist Richard Scaife, a backer of the influential Heritage Foundation, then hired him to start a think tank.
He used his experiences to prompt faith-based investors to engage with companies rather than sell their shares. His argument: "Jesus ate with tax collectors and prostitutes."
Shareholders have relied on advisory companies such as ISS to help them cast their votes in a more or less automated manner, mainly because there are too many votes to do them all by hand. When Bowyer showed a large, faith-based institutional investor that such automation meant they often voted shares against their values, the firm asked Bowyer for a voting alternative. So the family got to work.
Their main workspace is the dining room of their home near McKeesport, Pennsylvania. Both Jerry, 62, and Susan, 61, are Pennsylvania natives. A reproduction of a painting of Mary holding the baby Jesus by the 19th Century painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau hangs above their office desk.
Bowyer Research gathered voting categories used by proxy advisers and compiled them into about 1,000 choices using an app built by one of the Bowyer's sons. They then sorted through the data so that views of conservatives could be more accurately voted.
The Bowyer's voting policy "aligns with our standing as a neutral-service provider committed to offering clients diverse policy choices," Lorraine Kelly, global head of investment stewardship at ISS, said in an emailed statement.
Not everyone is optimistic that Bowyer's strategy will have much sway. The fact that conservative shareholder proposals rarely get more than 2% backing suggests the problem is lack of support, not the voting structure, said Andrew Behar, head of As You Sow, a progressive shareholder advocacy group. As You Sow's proposals often get 10 times that level of support, or more.
Behar said he and Bowyer agree that the corporate focus should be on fiduciary responsibility, and not political causes. However, they disagree on the politics that's behind making the fiduciary argument.
Bowyer said his guidelines allow conservatives to more effectively target management policies that are progressive. The goal is that if enough red-state and conservative funds adopt the guidelines, shareholder support for conservative-backed resolutions such as those opposing debanking or religious discrimination can reach at least 5%. That's the minimum required to keep a proposal on the ballot for another year, and it also would take away votes from the left. He said he hopes to see some signs of change as early as the 2026 annual meeting season.
"Our argument is we're having a conversation, and we're setting the agenda and that's true," Bowyer said. "But we can't be coming in at 1% forever and be taken seriously."
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