Wall Street’s Big Money Is Betting On Biden And Democrats In 2020

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Former Vice President Joe Biden speaks during a campaign kickoff rally on May 18, 2019 in Philadelphia. For the first time in a decade, Wall Street’s deep-pocketed donors are giving more money to Democrats than Republicans.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

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That’s important, because the finance sector is by far the biggest contributor to political campaigns in the country.

Trump still has friends in finance, such as private equity’s billionaire titan Stephen A. Schwarzman, CEO of Blackstone Group, and discount online brokerage pioneer Charles Schwab. But Republican mega-donor Robert Mercer of Renaissance Technologies is giving a lot less to the party this year.

Meanwhile, wallets are opening faster for Democrats this election season than they did in 2016, says Charles Myers, chairman of Signum Global Advisers, who helped raise money for Hillary Clinton four years ago.

«For people to write a 100-thousand-dollar check, a 250-thousand-dollar check. That would have been really extraordinary four years ago. Today we’re seeing a lot of that.»

The stock market may be hitting records, but a lot of people who work in finance have soured on Trump’s management style, Myers says.

«People are just exhausted. It’s hard to make medium-to-long-term capital allocation decisions because you never know what his White House is going to do,» he adds.

Andrew Redleaf, founder of the hedge fund company Whitebox Advisors, has been a Republican donor in the past. He gave to the campaign of 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney. He calls himself a libertarian conservative who favors free trade and immigration.

This year, he’s given money to the Lincoln Project, a group of conservative never-Trumpers who are running scathing ads against the president in swing states.

«I’d like there to be a right-of-center, limited-government party…which is not the Trumpist Republican party,» Redleaf says.

Redleaf is wary of Democrats, and has no particular affection for Biden.

But the former vice president is a known commodity on Wall Street and is widely seen as a more centrist, acceptable alternative to more liberal Democrats who ran for president, such as Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Biden has also been a top recipient of financial industry money for decades, as a senator from Delaware, home to financial and credit card companies.

«He’s not somebody that the industry is particularly afraid of,» Bryner says. «So I think that we would see them kind of hopeful that he would be a more moderating influence whereas Trump can be quite unpredictable.»

• democrats and republicans
• wall street money
• donors
• campaign finance