After New York primary, Wall Street remains a big factor in campaign

The presidential primary campaign is moving on from New York, but is not leaving Wall Street behind.

Despite Hillary Clinton’s decisive win in the Empire State, Bernie Sanders has the money and the devoted following he needs to fight on and continue his attacks on Clinton’s ties to Wall Street. Meanwhile, after Donald Trump’s commanding victory in his home state, Wall Street movers and shakers may be even more invested in the attempt to halt his juggernaut.

Trump and Sanders, the two surprisingly successful insurgents in the 2016 campaign, have the distinction of being loathed on Wall Street. This is no surprise in Sanders’ case. He is a socialist, after all, who has made Wall Street bankers and billionaires the prime villains of his crusade against the wealthy 1% of Americans who fund the nation’s political system and control most of its wealth. But Trump is a billionaire himself, a businessman who has gone to Wall Street banks many times to borrow money to fund his enterprises (according to his recent financial disclosure records, he still owes those banks hundreds of millions of dollars). So why have many Wall Streeters been pouring money into the Our Principles PAC, one of the chief players in the dump Trump effort?

For starters, folks in the financial industry are not happy that Trump talks like a traitor to his class when he threatens to raise taxes on Wall Street. What really freaks them out, though, are his simplistic ideas about immigration and international trade.

Politico’s chief economic correspondent, Ben White, has explained why: “The pitch to Wall Street titans and other CEOs is that a President Trump would be disastrous for markets and the economy. Many economists say that if the U.S. were to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants in a single year, the immediate hit to gross domestic product would lead to a depression. And slapping massive tariffs on goods from Mexico and China could dramatically increase prices for U.S. consumers and create destabilizing trade wars.”

After the New York primary, the chance of denying Trump the Republican presidential nomination appears more remote than it already seemed. He is likely to do well in the upcoming Northeastern primaries and could close the deal in California’s primary on June 7. If that scenario plays out, most of the Wall Street crowd will throw their hopes and money to Clinton, according to Politico’s analysis.

Such an eventuality would only reinforce Sanders’ central critique of Clinton. In ever more angry and caustic language, he has been painting a picture of the Democratic front-runner as bought and paid for by Wall Street, repeatedly decrying the millions of dollars financial interests have donated to the pro-Clinton PACs and demanding that she release transcripts of three private speeches for which Goldman Sachs paid her $675,000.

Obviously, this harsh rhetoric did not prevent Clinton from winning by a whopping 20% in New York, but it may have convinced even more of Sanders’ young supporters that Clinton is hopelessly corrupt and undeserving of their votes if she becomes the Democratic standard bearer.

The question now is whether Sanders will back off for the sake of Democratic Party unity or if he will stay on the attack. My guess is that Sanders is a man so swept up in the adoration of his young acolytes and so entranced by polls that show him to be an easy victor in the general election that he will give scant thought to the interests of a party he joined only as a vehicle for his own candidacy.

So, Clinton is likely to be harassed by Sanders all the way to the Democratic convention in Philadelphia, just as Trump will be in a fight with his antagonists unless and until he finally manages to win the votes of 1,237 delegates at the Republican convention in Cleveland.

The cable news consensus on Tuesday night was that Trump and Clinton will prevail and face off in the fall campaign. In that event, will Trump take up Sanders’ line of attack against Clinton, branding her as the financiers’ tool? And, if so, how many voters will honestly believe a billionaire businessman could ever be the scourge of Wall Street?