Top CEOs Donate to Romney Over Obama by 4-1 Margin - First Read
The chief executives of America’s top corporations have thrown their financial support to Mitt Romney over President Obama by more than a 4-1 margin, according to a review of federal records conducted by NBC News.
The presumptive Republican nominee’s presidential campaign has received almost $322,000 in direct donations from the CEOs of the companies listed on the annual “Fortune 500” list of the biggest U.S. companies.
By comparison, the Obama campaign has raked in $75,500 in contributions this election cycle from CEOs of the companies included on the list, according to records through the second quarter of 2012 on file with the Federal Election Commission.
While the sums are but a drop in the bucket relative to the hundreds of millions of dollars raised by both campaigns, they paint a picture of where the upper echelons of corporate America’s sympathies might lie at this point in the campaign. Overall, the Obama campaign has raised about $300 million in total, and the Romney campaign has collected roughly $153 million.
Federal records indicate that 147 CEOs have made some level of contribution directly to either the Obama or Romney campaign. Eighteen of those individuals contributed to Obama; 129 gave to the Romney campaign. Many of the CEOs - though not all of them - donated the maximum $5,000 to their candidate of choice, hewing to laws limiting contributions to $2,500 each for the primary and general election campaigns.
