​It’s no surprise that there is not a clear consensus among the financial elite regarding the outcome of Tuesday’s midterm elections, which will decide political control of Congress. On the one hand, the first two years of the Donald Trump presidency have given Wall Street much to celebrate: the massive reduction of the corporate tax rate to 21 percent, from 35 percent, has been a bonanza for its clients, boosting profits with a flick of a presidential pen. Higher corporate profits often lead to higher C.E.O. confidence, which leads to higher investment-banking activity—more mergers and acquisitions, more deals, more financing (all of which has happened)—and that is very good for the bonuses of Wall Street bankers, both individually and collectively. Trump has also started to roll back many of the onerous regulations that got imposed on Wall Street in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Needless to say, Wall Street likes that, too: a freer hand to take risks is just the kind of thing financiers love, especially when it can be done with other people’s money. And Wall Street likes a booming economy, even if it results in marginally higher interest rates. Some on Wall Street will even admit to liking a conservative swing to the Supreme Court, and in judgeships more generally.

​But, needless to say, there have been downsides to the Trump presidency, even from the perspective of its greatest beneficiaries. Wall Street, of course, does not support the Trump trade wars, which act as a tax on consumers and many of the corporations that now have to pay more for the raw material, such as steel and aluminum, that they use every day. The industry is also bothered by Trump’s inane rhetoric on immigration and his perceived—but non-existent—threat of an invading army making its way to our southern border. Wall Street may not be perfect—far from it—but it does understand, and appreciate, the value of a diverse workforce composed of the world’s best and brightest. It’s also a firmament that values order and stability. Why does Trump feel the need to piss off our allies and embrace our enemies? Why does Trump abandon beneficial treaties such as the Paris climate accord or the Iran nuclear deal without offering an alternative of any kind? Why does he stoke the flames of insane white nationalists who then think it’s O.K. to send pipe bombs to opposition leaders or to go on a killing rampage inside a synagogue on Shabbat morning? Why is he forever insulting our intelligence, to say nothing of our sense of morality and ethics, with his endless barrage of lies and name-calling, like the worst kind of playground bully? None of these things are a good look as far as Wall Street is concerned.

​So while there may not be a consensus on Wall Street about what voters will do tomorrow, there does seem to be a conviction that the American people have seen enough of Donald Trump after two years to know that he needs a carburetor, a way for another branch of government to check his worst instincts, and that it will come in the form of the Democrats taking back majority control of the House of Representatives. “We are going to win!!” one prominent Wall Street Democrat e-mailed me last night. “No choice.” He predicted that the Democrats would win more than 35 seats in the House of Representatives—well more than the 23 seats needed to get control of the chamber. Another prominent Wall Streeter, a private-equity mogul, agreed that the Democrats would win between 25 and 35 seats in the House, although he thought the Republicans might pick up as many as two new Senate seats, including one in New Jersey, where the controversial Democratic Senator Robert Menendez is seeking re-election against Bob Hugin, the pharmaceutical executive. Like many others of his ilk, this private-equity mogul couldn’t help but extemporize on Trump’s flawed tactics—his decision to inflame the electorate rather than focus relentlessly on successes, like the economy. “The whole thing is focused on the wrong issues,” he wrote. “[Y]et here we are.” (He’s also hoping that if the Democrats take back the House, they will be sensible enough to choose someone other than Nancy Pelosi as the new Speaker. “Not her, please.”)

​Then there are those on Wall Street who are more philosophical about the whole thing. Another longtime banker explained to me that while Trump “offends our deepest sensibilities,” America has been mostly fortunate in its leaders and its fortunes “at least relative to the last 20,000 years.” He worries that many Americans have “no perspective” and no “core compass” upon which to rely. “Not bad,” he writes, “just ignorant. Just like the people who followed Hitler, Stalin, Vlad the Impaler, Pol Pot, Himmler, Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Ivan the Terrible, Leopold II, Kim Il Sung, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Nero, Genghis Khan, Mao Zedong, Robespierre, Osama bin Laden, Attila the Hun, and Talaat Pasha. Maybe we now have the first American added to the list.” He thought maybe we had “evolved beyond this shit” but apparently not. He explained that he had just re-read Plato’s Republic. “The key to maintaining sanity,” he wrote. The “long run,” he continued, was not 2030 but rather 2130. “Humanity will prevail.”

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