(José Niño, Headline USA) Private equity has swung firmly behind Republican candidates this election cycle, breaking from its usual pattern of splitting donations evenly between the two parties, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
Employees at buyout and investment firms sent roughly $60.2 million to congressional candidates and party committees through June, with 65% flowing to Republicans versus 35% to Democrats, a 30 point gap drawn from OpenSecrets tracking data cited by the WSJ.
The imbalance grows even wider when looking at donations to outside groups, which face no legal spending caps. The WSJ reported that private equity funneled about $90 million to conservative organizations while giving less than $17 million to liberal ones through the same period.
This marks a sharp departure for an industry that leaned only slightly Democratic across the last four election cycles and hasn’t shown this strong a partisan lean since 2014, when Republicans also held a 30-point edge, the paper noted.
Part of the shift traces to business’s traditional preference for incumbents, which currently benefits the GOP given its control of the White House and both chambers of Congress. Republican fundraising has also outpaced Democratic efforts this cycle after major donors pulled back their support for Democrats, the Journal said.
James Maloney, founder of lobbying firm Tiger Hill Partners and former public affairs chief at the American Investment Council, told the Journal that ideology plays a role too. “The two main causes of the shift are the progressive profile of many of the Democratic candidates, and signs that current Democratic leadership plans to scrutinize the industry if they are in the majority,” he said.
This rightward drift extends beyond private equity. Andrew Mayersohn, a researcher at OpenSecrets, told the paper that most business sectors have shifted 10 to 15 percentage points toward Republicans compared with 2024, and that the broader finance, insurance and real estate sector now favors Republicans 58% to 42% after narrowly backing Democrats two years earlier.
Will Dunham, head of the American Investment Council, pushed back on the partisan framing, stating his group “is proud to partner on a bipartisan basis with members of Congress focused on driving Main Street investment, job creation and growth in states and districts across the country,” per the Journal.
Still, policy stakes loom large. The WSJ detailed how Trump has eased regulatory pressure on the industry, while Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., both positioned to chair key committees if their party retakes Congress, have criticized buyout practices. Maloney warned that a Democratic majority would bring “direct oversight and investigations into their practices, and a much higher degree of reputational risk, particularly for the leading firms.”
Blackstone employees led all firms in spending at roughly $30.1 million, directed mostly toward Republicans, the WSJ reported, followed by Apollo Global Management at $9.1 million, Bain Capital at $5.6 million and KKR at $4 million.
José Niño is the deputy editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/JoseAlNino
