New Yorkers Against Wall Street

Wall Street has clearly lost the battle for public opinion in 2016. Whether that means it will lose the battle for power in 2017 is, alas, another question.

The exit poll in Tuesday’s New York presidential primary asked voters whether they thought Wall Street helped or hurt the economy. Not surprisingly, 63 percent of Democratic voters said it hurt while just 30 percent said it helped. Somewhat more surprisingly, 48 percent of Republicans said it hurt while just 43 percent said it helped. Considering that New York is one of just three states (along with Connecticut and New Jersey) where actual Wall Streeters live, this bipartisan rejection has to be one of the Street’s unkinder cuts.

When the poll breaks down the responses of voters for the various presidential candidates, the Democratic numbers aren’t all that surprising. Among the 30 percent of Democrats who think Wall Street helps Main Street, 79 percent supported Hillary Clinton and 21 percent Bernie Sanders. Among the 63 percent who thought Wall Street runs roughshod over Main Street, 46 percent were Hillary supporters and 54 percent Bernie backers.

Republican voters, by contrast—well, here’s what Republican voters said. Among the 48 percent who said Wall Street hurts the economy, 15 percent backed Ted Cruz, 25 percent backed John Kasich and 60 percent backed Donald Trump. Among the 43 percent who believed it helps the economy, 15 percent backed Cruz, 24 percent Kasich and 61 percent Trump. In Tuesday’s election, 15 percent of GOP voters backed Cruz, 25 percent Kasich, and 60 percent Trump.

Detect a pattern here? These three distinct constituencies constitute identical shares of the “Like Wall Street” and “Hate Wall Street” crowds, which in turn makes clear that the three Republican candidates have not differentiated themselves on the issue or even highlighted it in a way that moves any of their voters. But despite the failure of any of the GOP candidates to raise the issue, a clear plurality of Republican voters—absent any prompting from Trump, Cruz, or Kasich (or for that matter, from any of the 14 erstwhile GOP candidates who’ve abandoned the race)—say Wall Street’s effect on the nation is negative.

On the Democratic side, the fact that Clintonites outnumber Sanderistas by a nearly four-to-one margin among those who think well of Wall Street reflects what may be the most fundamental difference between the two candidates: Sanders acknowledges the existence of a class war and names the enemy (Wall Street); Clinton, padding down the well-worn path of every prominent political leader since (but not including) Franklin Roosevelt, does nothing of the sort.

Clinton has condemned particular Wall Street practices and has proposed reforms, but acknowledging that the financial sector has grown at the expense of the rest of the nation, and that it must be greatly diminished and constrained if the middle class is to grow again, clearly isn’t her cup of tea. Unlike Sanders, she won’t back the financial transaction taxes common in many European nations, except in the case of high-frequency traders; she won’t back an across-the-board raise in the capital gains tax (she backs it for short-term investors only); she doesn’t favor breaking up the big banks (though she does favor reining in unregulated shadow banks). Both Clinton and Sanders genuinely want to diminish income inequality and have multiple proposals to do that, but Sanders goes beyond that in seeking to reverse the past four decades’ flow of income from labor to capital.

Of late, Sanders has come under attack by Clinton supporters for his persistent criticism of her speeches to Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street behemoths. I know of no public poll that has disaggregated the various causes of the decline in the public’s belief in Clinton’s honesty and trustworthiness, but Sanders’s focus on the Goldman talks surely contributed to her credibility problem. It was, of course, an act of political idiocy on Clinton’s part to give those speeches in the first place, following, as they did, the Great Recession, Occupy Wall Street, and the growing toxicity of the big banks in the public’s eyes. That said, by highlighting Clinton’s talks, Sanders has surely shone a spotlight on one of her most glaring vulnerabilities.

Nevertheless, his attacks could yet have a distinctly positive effect. If Clinton is elected, she will face enormous pressure to keep leading Wall Street figures off her top economic team. This will include the likes of Robert Rubin and Timothy Geithner, who formulated economic policy in the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama administrations in ways that bolstered the big banks and hurt the real economy—or, if you will, that advantaged capital at the expense of labor.

When Franklin Roosevelt was considering whom to appoint to top Treasury positions in the months between his 1932 election and his inauguration, he told his aide Raymond Moley that he couldn’t appoint “anyone from 23”—23 Wall Street being the address of the J.P. Morgan bank. By highlighting Clinton’s ties to Wall Street, Sanders hasn’t damaged her to the point that he will become the Democratic nominee, but he has made it more difficult for her to take anyone from today’s 23s. By so doing, he has compelled Clinton, if elected, to be a better president.