Donations show Bush and Clinton are still Wall Street's favorite candidates

(Image credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

last updated 16 October 2015

Quarterly presidential fundraising reports released this week reveal that Wall Street's top picks for president are still Republican Jeb Bush and Democrat Hillary Clinton. Bush collected more than $900,000 from people who work in finance, while Clinton took in just under $700,000. In addition, several Clinton bundlers who hail from the finance industry each raised $100,000 or more.

Wall Street's preference for the dynasty candidates is nothing new: Despite her attempts to strike a populist tone, Clinton has long had close ties to Wall Street. "If it turns out to be Jeb versus Hillary we would love that," said a Wall Street lawyer in 2014, adding that "either outcome would be fine."

Both campaigns also took in the most donations — $3.1 million for Clinton and $845,000 for Bush — from another broadly disliked industry: lawyers.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.