A recent study from Stanford University and King’s College London published in July by the British Journal of Political Science revealed something that is probably not a surprise to most people familiar with small business in America: people who own businesses lean to the political right.

"Leveraging diverse sources of data — representative surveys from around the world, campaign finance records, voter files, and a first-of-its-kind, bespoke survey of small business owners — we find consistent evidence that small business owners are more likely to identify with and vote for right-wing parties," the study's authors wrote. "The experience of being a small business owner leads people to adopt conservative views on government regulation.”

Is that a surprise? Not really. For more than 20 years I've written about small-business owners and have run my own small business, and none of this is news to me.

For starters, I speak to more than 50 trade and industry conferences a year on public policy, economic and technology issues impacting businesses. The audiences I speak to range from 200 to sometimes more than 5,000 people. And who are they? Mostly business owners (and mostly middle-aged white men too, but that's another story for another day).

These are good and smart people. They have quietly and successfully run businesses in places you may never have heard of, often through multiple decades and involving many generations of workers and family. And although I tend to avoid politics in my presentations, it's not difficult to read the room.........

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