“Eighty percent of Wall Street executives and their spouses’ donations go to Democrats.”
U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, during a speech April 12 at the New Hampshire Freedom Summit
You’ll often hear Democratic politicians decry income inequality and the pattern of the rich getting richer. But at the New Hampshire Freedom Summit — a gathering in Manchester, N.H., sponsored by the conservative groups Americans for Prosperity and Citizens United — U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert got into the action, too.
The Texas Republican, though, took aim at Democrats for hypocrisy.
“The dirty little secret on Wall Street: Eighty percent of the Wall Street executives’ and their spouses’ donations go to Democrats,” Gohmert said. “It’s like they’ve got some kind of little sweet deal where we’ll call you fat cats and demean you and stuff, but you will get richer than your wildest dreams.”
We wondered: Is it true that “80 percent of Wall Street executives and their spouses’ donations go to Democrats”?
We asked Gohmert’s office for its sourcing, and it provided several columns in the National Review by Michael Franc of the conservative Heritage Foundation.
In one of them, Franc wrote that “a review of Federal Election Commission data for the current presidential-election cycle sheds light on this important question.”
“Judging by who they support for president, a strong majority of employees at the highest reaches of Wall Street’s big financial institutions are, well, big liberals,” Franc wrote. “More Wall Streeters shower far more money — both overall as well as on average — on the more liberal presidential candidates than on their more conservative alternatives.”
Franc wrote that he used Fundrace 2008, a campaign-finance data tool created by The Huffington Post, to look at donations from such employees as investment bankers, managing directors and senior managing directors.
He found that at Bear Stearns, 68 percent of individual donations went to Democrats. At JPMorgan Chase, it was 75 percent. At Lehman Brothers, it was 69 percent. At Goldman Sachs, the Democratic share was more than two-thirds (Franc didn’t specify in his article), while at Morgan Stanley it was more than half. At American International Group, it was 76 percent. Indeed, among the firms Franc looked into, only individuals at Merrill Lynch gave a majority to Republicans.
Right off the top, though, there’s an important caveat to how Gohmert portrayed Franc’s figures. Gohmert used the present tense, but — as you might expect, given the presence of the now-defunct Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers in the data and the use of a tool called “Fundrace 2008” — Franc’s research was conducted in 2008.
Not only is that four campaign cycles ago, but there’s also been a sea change in Wall Street’s partisan preferences since then.
The Center for Responsive Politics addressed this question in a 2013 report examining campaign-finance disclosures by donors and candidates.
The center wrote that Wall Street money follows power, and after Democrats took control of the House and Senate in 2006, their share of such donations increased.
“As recently as 2009, Democrats were collecting more campaign cash from Wall Street than Republicans,” the center wrote. But, the center added, “that dynamic shifted at the end of 2009, with more money flowing to Republicans in 2010.” And starting in 2011, the report continued, “the gap widened and Wall Street’s financial support for one party (the GOP) began to tip the scales.”
During the 2012 campaign cycle, donations by individuals in the center’s “securities and investment” category — the closest category to “Wall Street” — were running 70 percent to Republicans, and so far during the 2014 cycle, 63 percent of the industry’s money is going to Republicans.
For individuals in the category “commercial banks,” 71 percent of donations went to Republicans in 2012 and 74 percent so far in 2014. And for the umbrella category “finance, insurance, and real estate,” 66 percent went to Republicans in 2012 and 58 percent so far in 2014.
For each of these three categories, the year Franc based his data on — 2008 — was either the high point or close to the high point for Wall Street donors’ friendliness to Democrats (at least going back to 1990, when the center began collecting this data).
So by relying on Franc’s data from 2008, Gohmert isn’t just using old data — he’s using the peak year for Democratic giving and ignoring three subsequent cycles in which Wall Street donations tilted in the opposite direction.
There are other problems with Gohmert’s claim:
- None of Franc's published data reaches 80 percent. Gohmert exaggerated even what's in Franc's data.
- Gohmert conflated "Democrats" with "Obama" and the presidential race with all races. Franc, unlike Gohmert, noted this in his piece that his analysis doesn't "delve into employee contributions to candidates for the House and Senate."
When we reached Franc — now an aide to House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. — he didn’t defend the specific language Gohmert used. But he said he believes Gohmert’s underlying point — that affluent “elites” lean Democratic, despite the party’s attacks on “the rich” — is fair.
“Elites behave politically far differently than the conventional wisdom says they do,” Franc said. “… The Democrats still overperform politically in congressional districts with heavy concentrations of wealth and post-graduate education.”
Our ruling
Gohmert said “80 percent of Wall Street executives and their spouses’ donations go to Democrats.”
Gohmert would have had a stronger argument if he’d said that was the case six years ago. But that’s no longer true.
In fact, the exact opposite pattern has held for Wall Street donations during the past three election cycles. In addition, Gohmert overstated Franc’s percentages and ignored the difference between donations to Democratic presidential candidates and congressional candidates. We rate his claim False.
About the Author
