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Hillary Clinton needs more Wall Street backers

She lives in the shadow of Wall Street and spent 8 years as a U.S. senator from New York, representing the financial industry’s interests in Washington. So she must have a long list of Wall Street cronies eager to help push her into the White House—and seek favors in return.

That’s been the narrative surrounding Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president. Fellow Democratic candidates Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley say Clinton is too cozy with Wall Street firms and not tough enough on the big banks. That probably helps explain Clinton’s fresh plan to get tough on Big Finance by imposing new fees on risk-taking banks, regulating parts of the financial system that still get little scrutiny and giving the biggest banks new incentives to slim down.

Given the popularity of the leftist Sanders and of bank-bashing Sen. Eliz Warren (D-Mass.), Clinton is undoubtedly eager to prove she’s no prisoner of Wall Street. But even if she is, she lacks the big campaign money Wall Street titans typically provide, and she’s on track to be trounced in Wall Street fundraising by Republican Jeb Bush.

If anything, Clinton needs more Wall Street money, especially since Sanders has morphed from a fringe candidate into a genuine contender whose fundraising rivals her own. And rather than putting some big donations at risk by attacking the industry they come from, Clinton may be doing the opposite: going after the financial industry because there’s not really that much support to jeopardize in the first place.

Wall Street in Jeb Bush's corner

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Of the top 100 sources of funds to Clinton’s campaign, for instance, only 13 are financial firms, and donors at those firms account for just 12% of all money given by the top 100 donors in the first half of 2015. Law firms are a much bigger source of funds for Clinton. Jeb Bush, by contrast, is much more reliant upon Wall Street money. His campaign’s biggest single source of funds is Goldman Sachs, whose employees gave $145,000 to the Bush campaign during the first half of the year. And Bush’s top 100 donors include twice as many financial firms as Clinton, accounting for at least 36% of the contributions from top donors.

That’s the small money going directly to the campaigns, where there’s a contribution limit of $5,400. The Wall Street gap is far more lopsided when it comes to the super PACs affiliated with each campaign, which can raise unlimited amounts from donors. Through the first half of the year, Bush’s main super PAC, Right to Rise, drew donations of $100,000 or more from nearly 60 individuals financiers, including big names such as Steve Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group, Ken Griffin of Citadel, David Tepper of Appaloosa Management and Julian Robertson of Tiger Management. Right to Rise raised a whopping $103 million in its first few months, giving Bush a comfortable lead in fundraising (though not in the polls).

Clinton’s super PAC looks like a coin purse, by comparison. Priorities USA Action (the same super PAC that helped Barack Obama get reelected in 2012) pulled in just $16 million in the first half of 2015, or one-seventh of Bush’s haul. Federal records show large donations from just six financial-industry vets, including familiar Democratic names such as hedge funders George Soros and David Shaw, along with Roger Altman of investment bank Evercore. Financial industry donations to Priorities USA totaled just $3.1 million through June 30 of this year. Some of the group’s biggest donors weren't hedge funds or investment banks but Hollywood moguls, including Jeff Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg of Dreamworks Animation.

Those records don’t yet capture donations made during the third quarter of 2015, which the presidential campaigns must make public by Oct. 15. And donations to super PACs during the second half of 2015 don’t have to be disclosed until Jan. 31, 2016. So Clinton may have lured some new Wall Street money to buttress the scant funds brought in earlier in the year. The Clinton campaign declined to comment for this story.

Some big donors may also be holding back because Clinton is still considered relatively likely to coast to victory in the Democratic primaries, with the bigger fight coming in the general election, once it’s clear who her Republican opponent will be. If Sanders or possible late-entry candidate Joe Biden don’t disrupt that scenario with a surprise primary win, Clinton may not need to roll out the big Wall Street guns until next year, anyway. If she has any guns to roll out, that is.

Rick Newman’s latest book is Liberty for All: A Manifesto for Reclaiming Financial and Political Freedom. Follow him on Twitter: @rickjnewman.