Kurt Andersen

This morning I happened to be looking through the May issue of Portfolio, which is a magazine that turns out to be a lot more compelling eight months after publication. A little info-graphic subtitled “How Investment-Bank Executives have split their donations to presidential campaigns” is especially interesting in hindsight, because two of those banks no longer exist and we now know how the election turned out.

Merrill Lynch was the ideological outlier — 86% of its top executives’ campaign donations as of last spring had gone to Republicans. Citigroup’s management group was the most bipartisan: 62% Democratic. And Barack Obama did best, relatively speaking, among the people who ran Lehman Brothers.

But what’s most interesting — bizarre, actually — is that the three most Democratic banks were Democratic to precisely the same degree: 93% of the campaign contributions from the top executives at each of J.P. Morgan Chase, Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley went to Obama, Hillary Clinton, et alia. As if we needed another data point to confirm the astonishingly sheep-like behavior of people on Wall Street.