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Investors now think Romney will win: SEI poll

Reverses Spring prediction that favored Obama

    by Joseph N. DiStefano
    Published 
52% of the 130 large U.S. independent investment advisers expect Republican Mitt Romney will be elected President in November, Montgomery County-based SEI Investments says, after surveying professionals managing over $100 million in millionaire clients' money. 
That's a shift in Romney's favor from May, when 63% of a similar sample expected incumbent Democrat Barack Obama would be re-elected. That story here.
"In their minds, the economy has become more important" to voters, and that has made Romney the more likely victor, Steve Onofrio, head of sales at SEI's financial advisors' group, told me. There's been a "fiscal flip" and a growing expectation that voters understand that under Obama taxes are more likely to rise, he said.
In the recent survey, the advisers were polled Sept. 13-19. Were they reacting favorably to the old fundraising footage posted by Mother Jones magazine during that period, showing Romney dismissing nearly half the potential electorate as pro-Obama moochers who depend on government payments? Tough to say, says Onofrio.
In both polls a large majority of the advisers personally favored Romney.

Separately, ardent capitalist Andrew Greenberg, partner at West Conshy-based Fairmount Partners, says the campaign is unusual for the apparently distant personalities of both candidates: It's Obama's "chilly professorial elitism" vs. Romney's  "prep-school contemptuousness."

    JN
    Joseph N. DiStefano