09/18 Campaign finance: Wall Street’s money

Who are America’s financial elite backing in 2020?

THE TIES between Wall Street financiers and politicians are the subject of a lot of scrutiny. Not for nothing is Goldman Sachs, a bank, sometimes nicknamed “Government Sachs”. But how important are the moneybags in New York to political success in Washington, DC? Quantifying the relationship can be done using the extensive data collected about campaign donations. It’s not an uplifting exercise.

The first task is to decide who counts as Wall Street’s elite. As well as encompassing the bosses of banks like JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, they also include the heads of some hedge funds, private-equity shops, asset managers and wealth-management firms in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. In addition are billionaire New Yorkers on the Forbes list, who have earned their wealth via some form of finance, such as Michael Bloomberg of the eponymous financial-information firm. Totted up this way, the financiers amount to 68 people. Of these, 52 have given money to political campaigns in at least one of the two most recent general-election cycles (2015-16 and 2019-20). Together they are worth $310bn and manage firms with assets of over $32trn.

Estimates of their political contributions are drawn from campaign-finance data in the Federal Election Commisson, a regulator. The Economist has attempted to contact larger…