Disney Stock Drops after Florida Republicans Pass Bill to Strip Company of Autonomous Status
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Disney stock continued to fall this week after the Florida House passed a bill revoking the company’s autonomous governmental status.
While Disney stock reached an all-time high in March 2021 of nearly $200 per share, according to Fox Business, it has been declining ever since. When the market closed on Thursday, the stock was around $120 per share, a 33 percent drop from one year ago and an 8 percent drop from just two days earlier, prior to the passage of the bill.
The company’s stock woes come as Disney and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis have become embroiled in a political spat over the state’s Parental Rights in Education law. Disney CEO Bob Chapek announced in March that the company would suspend political donations in Florida over the bill, which prohibits lessons on gender identity and sexual orientation for students in kindergarten through third-grade.
“You have a company like Disney, who takes this special power and privileges that have been granted to them by the people and by the taxpayers,” Florida House speaker Chris Sprowls told National Review on Wednesday. “To use that power and privilege to mislead the public, on laws that are being discussed and passed in the legislature is wildly inappropriate.”
The state house voted 68-38 in favor of the bill, one day after the bill passed the state senate 23-16. The bill now heads to Governor Ron DeSantis for approval.
The measure would dissolve the Reedy Creek Improvement District near Orlando, a zone that allows Disney to act as a self-governing body and create its own regulations, building codes, and other municipal services. The company receives tax exemptions under the arrangement.
DeSantis had called on the legislature to consider such a measure on Tuesday.
“Disney and other woke corporations won’t get away with peddling their unchecked pressure campaigns any longer,” DeSantis said in a fundraising email on Wednesday. “If we want to keep the Democrat machine and their corporate lapdogs accountable, we have to stand together now.”
Meanwhile, families are turning away from Disney as it wades into the culture war, a recent poll found.
More than 68 percent of general-election voters say they are less likely to do business with Disney after reports that it plans to include sexual ideology in new content for children, according to the Trafalgar Group’s new National Issues Survey on Disney, which was sponsored by the Convention of States Action. The poll found that more than 69 percent of respondents said they were likely to support “family-friendly alternatives” to Disney.
The survey comes after an executive producer admitted to advancing a “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” to insert queerness into children’s animation during a Disney staff meeting on Florida’s Parental Rights in Education legislation last month.
“Our leadership over there has been so welcoming to my, like, not-at-all-secret gay agenda,” said Latoya Raveneau, an executive producer for Disney Television in a video obtained by journalist Christopher Rufo. “I was just, wherever I could, just basically adding queerness. . . . No one would stop me and no one was trying to stop me.”
The poll found 85.3 percent of Republicans said they are less likely to continue using Disney products, while 72.5 of independents and 48.2 percent of Democrats said the same.
Almost 78 percent of Republicans, 72 percent of independents and 59 percent of Democrats said they would support a family-friendly alternative to Disney.
