Morgan Stanley’s CEO James Gorman said he won’t vote for Donald Trump. But he’s not with Hillary Clinton, either.
On Tuesday, Gorman said, “When it comes time to go into the booth, I will be writing down President Mike Bloomberg.”
Gorman seemed to be sincere, but the comment got a large round of applause from the conferences monied crowd. Gorman said it at Bloomberg’s The Year Ahead 2016 conference, sitting on stage next to none other than Mike Bloomberg.
But Bloomberg downplayed the response as a sign that he may have won the presidency. “My peeps are in the house, but unfortunately they are all in the house.”
Gorman is not the first Wall Street heavy hitter to say Bloomberg was his top presidential choice. A year ago, at a Bloomberg conference, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman predict that Mike Bloomberg was going to run for president and win. Like so many of Ackman’s other bets recently, that one hasn’t panned out.
Gorman made his comment in response to a question about the fact that it appears a large number of Wall Street, traditionally Republican voters, seemed to be backing Clinton. Bloomberg editor John Micklethwait said that his reporters have found out that a large number of Morgan Stanley employees have donated to Clinton’s campaign, but that there was no evidence of a single employee being a Trump supporter.
Gorman responded that he had no idea who the employees of Morgan Stanley are voting for and hadn’t asked. He did say that he thinks employees of his firm have likely donated to both political parties, if not both presidential candidates.