- Crypto won big in the US elections.
- Industry execs say that crypto voters made their voices heard.
- Crypto companies have sent almost $200 million to pro-crypto PACs.
A version of this story appeared in our The Guidance newsletter on November 11. Sign up here. Ben Weiss is DL News’ Dubai Correspondent. The opinions expressed in this op-ed column are his own.
Crypto execs can’t help but brag.
The US election turned out as many of them had hoped.
Donald Trump, who branded himself as the “crypto president,” beat out Vice President Kamala Harris to win the White House.
Bernie Moreno, a Republican crypto champion, clobbered Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown, an industry sceptic, to win an Ohio Senate seat.
And Stand With Crypto, a lobbying group, said that 268 “pro-crypto” candidates won their elections compared to 122 “anti-crypto” candidates in the House of Representatives.
Industry power players interpreted the election results as a ringing endorsement of pro-crypto politics.
“On many, many issues, the voters said loud and clear that they want change,” Paul Grewal, the chief legal officer of Coinbase, posted on X. “Crypto is no exception.”
Crypto cash
I don’t buy it.
Sure, crypto had an impact, but I don’t believe a significant bloc of single-issue crypto voters helped sway elections. The industry’s money did.
Crypto-focused political action committees raised $197 million during the 2024 election cycle, according to a tracker developed by crypto researcher Molly White.
And PACs spent $133 million of that war chest.
That cash wasn’t explicitly lavished on trumpeting the cause of crypto. Rather, it was often spent on advertisements, which never mentioned crypto, for pro-crypto candidates.
In 59 political ads paid for by three of the biggest crypto PACs, none referenced decentralised tech, according to an analysis from Axios.
And on the campaign website for Moreno, on whom crypto PACs spent more than $40 million, there was no mention of digital assets on his “About” or “Why I’m Running” pages.
Rather, Moreno focused on “Communist China,” protecting the Second Amendment, and cutting government spending.
Exit polls
I’m flying in the face of industry-sponsored polls that say there’s a small but significant bloc of single-issue crypto voters.
However, my two Satoshis is that the election came down to the same issues Americans have always cared about: the economy, immigration, inflation, among others.
The percentage of voters who said they believed the state of the US’s economy was “not so good or poor” increased from 50% in 2020 to 68% in 2024, according to exit polls from NBC.
And, in an indication that immigration was a deciding issue for voters, Trump was able to flip counties on the Texas-Mexico border red for the first time in decades, per the Financial Times.
Maybe that’s why a crypto PAC-sponsored ad for Moreno said he would “back the Trump economic agenda,” stop “rampant inflation,” and halt “the flood of illegal immigrants.”
It never mentioned crypto.
Reach out to me at bweiss@dlnews.com.