Casino Industry Playing Role in 2016 Presidential Race

While Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are taking center stage in the 2016 Presidential Race, the casino industry is playing an interesting part behind the curtains.

Once an industry on its heels when it came to national politics, gambling is rarely discussed as a moral sin in politics these days. And legitimized casino corporations now get more press for backing the candidates of their choice.

MGM’s Jim Murren recently put his behind the Democratic candidate Clinton, while Tropicana owner Carl Icahn is backing the Republican Trump.

In the 2012 campaign season, Las Vegas Sands Corp. owner Sheldon Adelson fronted a whopping $100 million in Republican donations.

Now, Trump, a former casino owner in Atlantic City, is in a tight race with Clinton for the presidency.

Clinton made an appearance in Atlantic City and made it a point to bash Trump’s record of casino bankruptcies there. She didn’t, however, bring up any issues about gambling’s morality.

The Wall Street Journal points out that all of these signs point to the fact that casinos have done a good job of finally establishing themselves as mainstream entertainment.

“Our jobs are every bit as patriotic as auto worker jobs,” said Mr. Murren, who also heads the casino trade group American Gaming Association.

Not everybody is a fan of the political world’s acceptance of gambling, including Les Bernal, who heads the anti-gambling group Stop Predatory Gambling.

“The act of running a gambling house was seen as a dishonorable business,” said Bernal. He added that gambling is so ingrained in our society that “when Hillary Clinton has a press conference in Atlantic City she’s not slamming Trump for running a dishonest and predatory business. It’s because he lost money running [that] business.”

Carrie Gordon Earll, an executive at the Christian-values group Focus on the Family, also has an issue with politics’ treatment of gambling.

“Once gambling is in a state, it’s hard to remove it,” Earll said. Her group remains against gambling, but Focus on Family has since stopped campaigning so much on the issue over budget constraints.

Adelson is also against online gaming under the banner of morality. Of course, many have pointed out that he just wants to protect his brick-and-mortar casino business.

Adelson has sponsored different bills to ban online gaming in the US, including legislation recently introduced in the Senate that would ban financial transactions for iGaming.

Of course, there are plenty of proponents of regulated online gaming too, such as Murren. And given the interests on both sides of the spectrum, there’s likely to be heavy lobbying done as both the Presidential election and other political races conclude in November.