Cryptocurrency

Crypto PACs are helping Senators win US primaries faster than the Senate can move the law they want – Crypto News

Published

1 month ago

June 19, 2026

Dripp

Fairshake, the crypto industry’s flagship super PAC, put more than $12 million behind Barry Moore’s run for an open Alabama Senate seat, the largest single-candidate spend of its 2026 campaign, and on Tuesday, Moore won the Republican runoff with about 56% of the vote.

In a state this deeply red, where no Democrat has won a Senate seat outside a single 2017 special election in three decades, that result hands him a near-certain seat in November. The industry’s campaign arm is sitting on nearly $150 million more in cash and openly promising to build what its spokesman calls “the largest pro-crypto caucus in history.”

However, the one piece of legislation all of this money is meant to deliver, the market structure bill known as the CLARITY Act, is still parked on the Senate calendar with no floor vote scheduled. The biggest contradiction of the 2026 midterms is that crypto has learned to win elections at a remarkable rate while the law it actually wants keeps slipping through its fingers.

How crypto money turned primaries into a Senate candidate pipeline

The Moore win fits a pattern the industry has been running all year. Fairshake and its affiliates have concentrated their spending inside party primaries, where turnout is low, local ad markets are cheap, and the winner of a safe-seat primary is close to a lock for the general election. It essentially boils down to simple economics: a few million dollars spent in a sleepy primary in a one-party district buys far more influence over the next Congress than the same sum spent in a crowded, expensive swing-state general where the outcome is genuinely up for grabs.

The industry devoted more than $7 million to Andy Barr’s Kentucky Senate primary, the race to replace retiring Republican leader Mitch McConnell, and Barr cruised to victory with more than 60% of the vote. That money came out of a roughly $20 million Southern spending blitz Fairshake ran across Alabama, Kentucky, and Georgia, and most of those bets came home. The PAC went 6-0 across the May Southern primaries and, by its own count, 11 for 11 in June, an incredible hit rate.

The money flows to both parties, which is the second thing the candidate map shows. Through its Democratic-leaning affiliate Protect Progress, the industry backed Christian Menefee in Houston’s redrawn 18th District, where he defeated 21-year congressman Al Green in the May Democratic runoff with roughly 69% of the vote.

The same affiliate put $1.5 million into ads opposing Green, a longtime critic the sector had graded hostile, and the seat itself is safely Democratic, so Menefee is the strong favorite to keep it in November. A generational contest over age and seniority in a Houston district doubled as an outright win for crypto money on the left.

But the machine does lose sometimes, and we’ve seen that in Illinois. Fairshake spent more than $10 million trying to stop Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton in the state’s Democratic Senate primary, and she won anyway, which all but guarantees the next Senate will seat a member the industry spent heavily against. Those misfires are rare enough that they mostly serve to make the wins look more deliberate, and they’re a useful reminder that the spending tilts races but can’t control them outright.

What ties these contests together is leverage. To shape the committees that will go on to write crypto laws, the industry only has to tip enough low-turnout primaries in safe districts, and the winners then come to Washington owing most of their seats to crypto money. It’s a big shift from the last cycle’s more defensive posture: the money now moves earlier, turning cash into nominees and nominees into seats that are settled long before Election Day.

What the industry is actually buying

Fairshake is chasing a legislative payoff, and it’s looking to push a pretty short list of specific bills. The PAC is mostly funded by Coinbase, the venture firm a16z, and Ripple, and those backers have poured hundreds of millions into the effort across two cycles because the rules in question directly affect their businesses. Coinbase and Ripple both spent years tangled in SEC litigation over how their products should be classified, and the legislation that’s now in front of Congress would settle much of that fight in their favor.