“ ‘They won’t open the stock market if Elizabeth Warren is the next president.’ ”

That’s Leon Cooperman, the billionaire boss at Omega Advisors, joking to a crowd at the Delivering Alpha conference in New York this week about what a win for the left could ultimately mean for investors.

He wasn’t joking, however, in his belief that somebody like Elizabeth Warren in the White House would be disastrous for the stock market.

“The Democratic Party seems to be leaning towards the left on policies, which is very harmful for the economy. I don’t like the shift to the left,” he explained to CNBC, adding that the market, of course, will open, but it won’t be pretty.

“It would be a bear market and they go on for a year and go down 25%,” he said. “You don’t make the poor people rich by making rich people poor.”

Of course, as one member of the Financial Twitterati pointed out, fears of a Democrat steering the ship just might be overblown:

That’s the thing about markets... they’re hard to predict:

Warren, who has proposed a wealth tax on assets above $50 million, has been climbing the polls in the packed Democratic presidential field, trailing only former Vice President Joe Biden in the latest NBC/WSJ tally.

“Her policies are counterproductive,” Cooperman said. “They’re negative for capitalism, and capitalism is what brought America into the position we’re in today.” Watch the full interview: