Longtime Trader Earns Political Stripes in U.S. Congressional Election
Traders Magazine Online News, December 14, 2010
Retired traders welcome afternoons filled with leisure, sunshine and golf after their hectic days on the desk are done. But for George Bodine, who retired from General Motors Asset Management in 2008, he chose politics and was involved in one of the tightest races in the recent mid-term elections for U.S. Congress.
Buerkle and Bodine at NOIP
And a wild election it was, with Republicans gaining 63 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and wresting control from the Democrats. Bodine's boss was among the winners that benefited from the backlash against Washington, D.C. and the economic policies of President Barack Obama's administration.
Bodine was a senior adviser to Ann Marie Buerkle, who won the 25th Congressional District in New York by a mere 561 votes--or three-tenths of 1 percent. The race was so close that it took three weeks for Buerkle, a conservative Republican, to be declared the winner. Her district encompasses Syracuse, N.Y., and three surrounding counties. The long-shot Buerkle defeated the Democratic incumbent Dan Maffei, whose war chest of campaign contributions was about four times the size of hers.
For Bodine, you might ask why politics, and why this race? He had a rooting interest: Before he retired from the GM trading desk, Bodine began dating Buerkle, a former high school classmate he met at a reunion in 2008. Since then, Bodine has split his time between working on the campaign and consulting to QSG, which offers pre- and post-trade analytical tools for investors.
"It was really rewarding to go in as an underdog, and to see more and more people signing on and buying into her message as the campaign progressed," Bodine said. "It is impossible to win an election without a team effort and everyone pulling in the same direction."
Buerkle was unavailable for comment, but a spokesman in an email told Traders Magazine that Bodine was involved in fundraising, signage and statistical analysis. "The countless hours he contributed were greatly appreciated," the spokesman wrote.
Mark Weiner, a political reporter who covered the campaign for The Post-Standard of Syracuse, said he saw Bodine at a number of functions, particularly the final week before ballots were cast on Nov. 2. "Every time I saw her in public, he was there," said Weiner, who works out of Arlington, Va. "Clearly, he held an important role."
From the start, political handicappers had considered the seat a "safe" one for the one-term incumbent Maffei, according to Weiner. And that appeared to be the case only weeks before Nov. 2. A Post-Standard/Siena Research Institute poll had Buerkle down by 12 percentage points three weeks before the election.
But Bodine said that the Buerkle camp thought the Post-Standard/Siena poll was inaccurate, as its own polling showed a much tighter race. That conclusion turned out to be correct.
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