Who Is Wall Street's Favorite Candidate?

Wall Street accounted for more than its share of big donors to presidential candidates in 2007. No surprise there.

What might come as a surprise is whom that cash went to.

Eight of the 10 top corporate sources of campaign cash were banks (actually, employees and their families), and six of those eight heavily favored Democrats. Who was the candidate with the biggest backing? Senator Hillary Clinton, Democrat of New York.

"No matter who becomes our next president, Wall Street will have an indebted friend in the White House," said Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, the nonpartisan group that crunched numbers from the Federal Election Commission and developed its analysis.

Goldman Sachs led the Street. Its employees and their families gave almost $1.5 million to presidential candidates, 71 percent of it to Democrats.

Employees of Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers (the biggest donor among all companies in the fourth quarter), and JP Morgan Chase have also favored Democrats.

The exceptions: Merrill Lynch and Credit Suisse.

Bloomberg News did its own analysis and found that for the fourth quarter of 2007 alone, Clinton took in $388,391 from employees of the top 10 U.S. stock underwriters.

Mitt Romney, the Republican ex-governor of Massachusetts, received $293,750 from that group. Senator Barack Obama, the Illinois Democrat, came in third with $251,860.

"Many of the Wall Street Democratic donors began to see her (Clinton) victory as inevitable," Rogan Kersh, an associate dean at the Wagner School at New York University, told Bloomberg. "And this is an unusually rational group of bettors, particularly skilled in anticipating return on investment; it made overwhelming sense to back Hillary Clinton through the fourth quarter."

Over all, Clinton raised the most of any candidate, both in the fourth quarter ($26.8 million) and in all of 2007 ($106.1 million).

Obama wasn't far behind, raising $22.8 million in the fourth quarter, bringing his 2007 total to $102 million.

Romney led Republicans, raising $9 million in the fourth quarter, which helped give him a $54 million total for the year. Newly minted front-runner Senator John McCain of Arizona raised $6.8 million for the fourth quarter, which brought his yearly total to about $37 million.

Romney raised $9 million from donors other than himself in the fourth quarter, which helped give him a $54 million total for the year. But he loaned his campaign $18 million in that quarter, and $35.4 million for the year.

Newly minted front-runner Senator John McCain of Arizona raised $9.7 million for the fourth quarter, which brought his yearly total to about $41.1 million, although he took out a $3 million loan in November.

Republican Ron Paul raised $19.9 million in the fourth quarter, for a total of $28.1 million for the whole year.

And Mike Huckabee, the winner of the Iowa caucus but nothing else, raised $6.6 million in the last three months of the year, for a 2007 total of $8.9 million.

Beyond banking, securities, investment, and hedge fund donors also tended to favor Democrats. Clinton was the top choice again: she collected $5.8 million from the former and $1.3 million from the later during the fourth quarter of 2007. For Republicans, these groups liked Romney the best, giving him $4.1 million and $837,125, respectively.

Romney, the founder of Bain Capital, is a big favorite of people who work at private-equity firms. Daniel Primack of PEHub.com, a website that focuses on the industry, said private equity gave $85,150 to Romney in the fourth quarter and $479,650 for all of in 2007.

Obama placed second with $253,788 for the whole year, but slipped to fifth place with this group in the fourth quarter. Clinton finished fourth and McCain sixth among private-equity donors in last three months of 2007.

PEHub says this shows the industry punished Democrats who came out in favor of a change to carried interest tax treatment, which would increase taxes on their profits.

PEHub also notes that venture capitalists gave more money to Obama in the fourth quarter than to any other candidate, helping him reach nearly $157,000 from this industry, which also is tops among his rivals.

"While this election has been unusual in a number of ways, we have seen consistency in the industries financing these candidates," Krumholz, of the Center for Responsive Politics, said in a statement.

by Liza Porteus Viana