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By BRODY MULLINS, SUSAN PULLIAM and STEVE EDER

Hedge-fund managers made a big bet on Barack Obama and other Democrats in 2008. Now, with the 2012 contest gearing up, some prominent fund managers have turned their backs on the party and are actively supporting Republicans.

Daniel Loeb, founder of Third Point LLC, was one of the biggest Obama fund-raisers in 2008, rounding up $200,000 for him, according to campaign-finance records. In the decade prior, Mr. Loeb and his wife donated $250,000 to Democrats and less than $10,000 to Republicans.

Hedging Their Bets

See donations from hedge-fund managers and their spouses and employees, 2000-10.
But since Mr. Obama's inauguration, Mr. Loeb has given $468,000 to Republican candidates and the GOP, and just $8,000 to Democrats. Hedge-fund kings have feelings, too, and the president appears to have hurt them.

"I am sure, if we are really nice and stay quiet, everything will be alright and the president will become more centrist and that all his tough talk is just words," Mr. Loeb wrote in an email about four months ago expressing frustration with the president's posture toward Wall Street. "I mean, he really loves us and when he beats us, he doesn't mean it." The email, sent to eight friends, was widely circulated on Wall Street.

Mr. Loeb is part of a shift in political allegiance within the world of hedge funds that also includes such big names as Steven Cohen's SAC Capital Advisors and Kenneth Griffin's Citadel Investment Group. Managers and employees of hedge funds directed a majority of their contributions to the GOP in the 2009-2010 election season, a pattern not seen since 1996, when the industry was much smaller.


Managers of hedge funds—private investment partnerships that cater to institutions and wealthy people—are reacting to what some criticize as Mr. Obama's populist attacks on Wall Street, as well as to Democrat-led efforts to raise their tax bills. They had hoped to be protected from such a tax move by their relationships with prominent Democratic members of Congress. "Hedge funds bankrolled the Democrats in the 2006 and 2008 elections, and the very people they helped put in power turned around and screwed them," said Sam Geduldig, a former Republican congressional staffer who is a Wall Street lobbyist.

A spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, Hari Sevugan, said Mr. Obama "campaigned on and took action to reform the industry because he knew it was the right thing to do...which is why he enjoyed broad support in 2008 and continues to do so today."

The shift toward Republicans is by no means universal. "I'm still a huge supporter" of Mr. Obama and planning to raise money for him, said Marc Lasry, CEO of Avenue Capital Group. He said one reason some of his peers are moving away from Mr. Obama is that they "disagree with his philosophy regarding the deficit," but "the president...is going to try to reduce the deficit." Mr. Lasry added: "When you really break it down, he has actually done a pretty good job."

Wall Street ranks alongside the legal profession and Hollywood as a plank in almost any presidential candidate's fund-raising. After lawyers, the investment sector was the largest source of donations for Mr. Obama's 2008 presidential campaign among industry sectors tracked by the Center for Responsive Politics. And hedge-fund money is the fastest-growing segment of contributions from that industry, more than doubling every four years. Investors are pouring money into hedge funds again, after souring on them during the financial crisis.

Mr. Obama blew away the field in presidential fund-raising in 2008, setting a record by collecting $750 million in contributions, with most of the donations small ones. Some political strategists speculate he could top $1 billion for his re-election bid.

The defection by some hedge-fund managers is among forces that could make that lofty figure hard to attain. Mr. Obama has also disheartened some labor unions, environmentalists and liberal activists by not moving as aggressively as they would like on their priorities. For the 2012 presidential race, it is too early to gauge with any precision how he or potential GOP candidates are doing in fund-raising.

Overall in the 2008 congressional and presidential elections, Democrats outdrew Republicans, $1.9 billion to $1.3 billion, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Democrats received the biggest share of donations from hedge-fund managers for most of the past two decades. From 1990 through 2008, according to data from the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, fund managers and their employees contributed about $40 million to candidates for Congress and the presidency. About two-thirds went to Democrats.

But 53% went to Republicans in the 2010 election cycle, when hedge-fund managers' and employees' donations totaled $11 million. GOP strategists credit a core group of fund managers for helping Republicans win control of the House, make inroads in the Senate and drive Mr. Obama toward the political center.

A half-dozen fund managers donated a total of $6 million to the Republican Governors Association in the weeks before the 2010 election and spent millions more to finance a blitz of ads for Republicans running for Congress.

The shift started near the end of the 2008 campaign, when Mr. Obama began blaming hedge funds for some of the country's economic problems.

In April 2009, when talks about saving Chrysler through a bankruptcy filing bogged down, the president faulted bond-holding hedge funds for the delay. "They were hoping that everybody else would make sacrifices, and they would have to make none." Mr. Obama said. "I don't stand with them."

That amounted to "bullying," one prominent fund manager, Cliff Asness of AQR Capital Management, wrote on his personal web page.

In the past, Mr. Asness had donated to Republicans, while employees of his fund gave chiefly to Democrats. But in the 2010 midterm campaign, Mr. Asness ramped up his Republican giving, while his employees all but stopped their donating to Democrats. Combined, he and the employees contributed $550,000 to Republicans and only about $3,000 to Democrats. Mr. Asness, like most of the fund managers, declined to comment.

Hedge funds' biggest complaint involved a tax bill. Shortly after Mr. Obama's inauguration, he and some congressional Democrats were pushing a plan to block managers of hedge funds and private-equity funds from paying a low 15% capital-gains tax rate on part of their income.

"No longer should we allow investment managers to have a better tax rate than teachers or doctors or firefighters," said a leading advocate of the change, Montana Democratic Sen. Max Baucus, during Senate debate.

Fund managers largely were willing to accept such a change; most of their share of fund profits didn't qualify for treatment as long-term capital gains anyway, because they traded so rapidly. But they drew the line at another proposed change.

The tax bill's writers worried that hedge-fund managers could avoid the highest tax rates by simply leaving their income in the fund, collecting it only when they eventually sold the fund itself. At that point, it clearly would qualify for the capital-gains rate, as profit on a sale of a long-held business. So, the tax bill's writers added a provision saying any profit from the sale of a hedge fund, a private-equity firm or other investment partnership would be taxed at the higher rates that apply to ordinary income.

Fund managers despised that idea. "If you founded a hedge fund, when you sold it you were treated worse than if you owned a peep-show business," said John Raffaelli, a Democratic fund-raiser and lobbyist for the hedge-fund industry.

Senate Democrats to whom fund managers had ties were hesitant to block the tax initiative, because it meshed with voter anti-Wall Street sentiment. Also, it could also mean as much as $2 billion of annual revenue.

The tax initiative ultimately failed when a broader measure that it was part of didn't pass, and now it is essentially dead because of GOP control of the House. Before it failed, the tax measure won support from New York Democratic Sen. Charles Mr. Schumer, following an amendment he made in it.

Mr. Schumer, who declined to comment, has remained a big recipient of hedge-fund contributions despite his vote, raising $500,000 from fund managers and their employees in the 2010 election cycle.

But the senator got a taste of hedge funds' frustrations with Democrats in February 2009, during a phone conversation with SAC Capital's Mr. Cohen. "I can't support the Democrats," Mr. Cohen said, according to a person familiar with the discussion. "There is no way I can support what they are doing."

Mr. Cohen had previously been a big Democratic supporter, regularly giving the maximum allowable to Democratic legislators in his home state of Connecticut. In 2008, he, his wife and SAC Capital employees donated more than $500,000 to Democrats, triple what they gave Republicans.

Last August, Mr. Cohen invited a small group of fund managers to a strategy session in his 32,000-square-foot Greenwich home. The gathering included Republican stalwarts such as Paul Singer of Elliott Management and Dan Senor of Rosemont Capital, but also some more recent Republican donors such as Bruce Kovner of Caxton Associates. The group decided to direct contributions to GOP campaign coffers and to pro-Republican groups that could raise and spend unlimited amounts.

Campaign reports show Mr. Cohen contributed $1.5 million in 2010 to one such group, the Republican Governors Association. The gifts put him among the top four individual donors to the association in a decade, ahead of mega-Republican donor David Koch of Koch Industries. Mr. Cohen contributed to only one Democrat for the 2010 midterm elections, giving $2,400 to Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon.

Mr. Cohen's political shift was driven in part by his concern about increases in government spending and deficits, said a person close to him.

Mr. Kovner of Caxton Associates hadn't dabbled very much in politics before the August meeting. In 2008, he gave $4,600 to two Republican candidates. After the meeting, he donated $615,000 to the GOP, including $500,000 to the Republican Governors Association. Mr. Kovner, along with most others at the meeting, declined to comment.

John Paulson and employees of his Paulson & Co., famed for a lucrative bet against the housing market and mortgage bonds before their collapse, had given about equally to the two parties in 2008. But in 2010, he and his employees gave three times as much to the GOP as to Democrats. Mr. Paulson himself gave about $410,000 to Republican campaign causes.

Citadel's Mr. Griffin and his wife, Anne Dias Griffin, who runs her own hedge fund, also had split their donations between the parties in 2008, but in 2010 they donated $1.8 million to Republicans and just $2,400 to Democrats.

A shift was also evident at Renaissance Technologies LLC. In 2008, its manager, Robert Mercer, and employees donated much more heavily to Democrats than to Republicans—$620,000 versus $95,000. In 2010, they gave $527,000 for Democrats but $782,000 to Republicans.

With the 2012 money race under way, Democrats are reaching out to mend fences. Mr. Schumer has held a series of dinners and chats with hedge-fund managers. Mr. Obama traveled to New York in late March for an event with fund-raisers from Wall Street and the fund industry.

Still, about 6,600 donations to the Democratic National Committee in March appear to include only a handful from hedge-fund people—fewer than from veterinarians or librarians.

Democrats say Mr. Obama is making moves to appeal to the fund industry and has time to win it back. "Whatever the numbers show…at the margins there has been a material shift in support for the president," said Orin Kramer, general partner of hedge fund Boston Provident and an Obama supporter.

—Scott Greenberg contributed to this article.
Write to Brody Mullins at brody.mullins@wsj.com, Susan Pulliam atsusan.pulliam@wsj.com and Steve Eder at steve.eder@wsj.com

Eric D. Schwerin
eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com

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