News

• The digital assets industry's Fairshake PAC is chalking up three victories in this week's congressional primaries.
• Crypto spending has helped defeat a number of Sen. Elizabeth Warren's congressional allies, including prominent progressive Rep. Cori Bush in Missouri.
• Fairshake said it's securing advertising time in 18 general-election contests, where it'll spend $25 million on its picks for Congress.

The crypto industry has devoted a seven-digit war chest to opposing candidates backed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and that spending may have contributed to some sitting lawmakers losing their jobs, according to the leading political action committee (PAC) funded by digital assets firms.

Bush, a prominent House of Representatives progressive, lost her primary battle to Wesley Bell, a Democratic prosecuting attorney, by a wide margin after anti-Bush forces began spending millions on opposition ads – easily outpacing the money her campaign raised from supporters. Crypto opposition – despite the hefty $1.4 million price tag from its Fairshake super PAC – was overshadowed by a massive, $9 million anti-Bush campaign from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which spent several million dollars to derail Bush in this week's primary.

"Cori Bush has now become the latest anti-crypto, Elizabeth Warren-endorsed lawmaker to lose their seat in Congress," said Josh Vlasto, a Fairshake spokesman, in a statement. "The crypto and blockchain community will continue to support candidates who believe in innovation and job creation."

This echoed the similar playbook to the earlier campaign against Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), which also drew a big-money response from the pro-Israel lobbying group in addition to a lesser (but still significant) opposition spending from the crypto sector.

Also in Tuesday primaries, Fairshake and its affiliates chalked up two victories of its hand-picked, pro-crypto candidates in Washington state and a different Missouri race.

In Washington state, the PACs spent $1.5 million to support Democrat Emily Randall in the 6th Congressional District, where she won in the state's top-two primary system . So, she'll face the second-highest vote winner in the general election, though she exceeded that Republican's vote total by more than 3,000 and would be expected to win.

In Missouri's 3rd Congressional District, the crypto PACs spent money to support Bob Onder, a Republican state senator, who won the Republican primary handily in a district that's expected to favor the Republican in the November elections.

That makes 26 U.S. congressional races in which the crypto industry has prevailed in either getting its pick or in opposing a candidate that the sector's hired political guns saw as a threat to the digital assets space. Sen. Warren and her allies have been a theme of the 2024 crypto spending – which has been outpacing most other U.S. industries. The most prominent example was the $10 million devoted to defeating Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) in her bid for the U.S. Senate. More recently, in Arizona's 3rd Congressional District, crypto pick Yassamin Ansari, a Democratic former vice mayor of Phoenix who has been a digital assets advocate, retains a 42-vote lead in her race (now heading for automatic recount) against a Warren-backed opponent.

With the U.S. congressional primaries soon winding to a close, Fairshake has set its sights on general-election contests. The PAC announced on Wednesday that it's beginning to secure advertising time in 18 districts, planning for about $25 million in spending.

“We will continue to deploy our resources in support of leaders on both sides of the aisle and in both houses who are committed to getting things done and working with the industry to pass responsible regulation that drives innovation, creates jobs, and sustains America’s global leadership,” Vlasto said in a statement.

Correction (Aug. 7, 2024, 20:00 UTC): Corrects byline.