Wall Street Money Moving From GOP

Yet Democrats have even grabbed 44% of the early money from Fidelity. After Romney, nearly all the rest went to New York Sen. Hillary Clinton and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama.

And this is not a one-off phenomenon.

In 1996, just after Newt Gingrich's free-market Republican radicals took power in Congress, the GOP collected a thumping 58% of campaign donations from Wall Street.

As recently as the 2000 election, Republicans got 55%.

Since then, the figure has been in sharp decline, plunging to just 45% in the last election.

What's going on?

A lot of it has to do with the individual candidates. Two Democratic candidates --Clinton and Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd -- enjoy unusually strong ties with Wall Street and the investment world. (On the other hand, so too do Republicans Romney and Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor.)

You expect incumbents to have the advantage. But Wall Street money started abandoning the GOP before the party lost power on Capitol Hill. And right now we are looking at presidential contributions, not those for Congress. No one running is an incumbent.

It doesn't take a hedge-fund genius to realize that this is not your father's Republican party. While Wall Street cheers Bush administration policies such as tax cuts and free trade, investment managers are horrified, for example, by the shocking federal deficits. "We've got a situation where the party of fiscal probity and balanced trade hasn't provided either since Dwight Eisenhower," says Harvard politics professor Richard Parker.

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