Crypto Midterm Spending Tops $176 Million Despite Low Voter Priority

Crypto groups have spent about $176 million across more than 100 U.S. midterm races this cycle, according to a Reuters review. An Ipsos survey for the DeFi Education Fund, a crypto policy advocacy group, found that only 13% of Americans consider candidate support for blockchain, crypto and decentralized finance extremely or very important.

The midterms are set for the following week. Fairshake and its affiliates account for about $150.8 million of that spending through Oct. 20. One Fairshake affiliate disclosed more than $46 million against former Sen. Sherrod Brown in Ohio’s Senate race. The disclosures show concentrated industry spending despite the lack of broad voter urgency on crypto-specific policy.

Voter priorities favor a wider fintech mandate

About 35% of respondents said it is very important that candidates ensure builders of the next generation of financial technology are encouraged to operate in the United States. That proposition ranked first in the survey. Only 26% said it was very important to support new rules allowing innovation in the financial system.

The broader fintech question produced a wider partisan split than crypto itself. Among Republican-leaning respondents, 45% rated it very important, compared with 30% of Democratic-leaning respondents. On the narrower question, the respective figures were 15% and 13%. Party identification in the survey includes independents who lean toward a party.

The DeFi Education Fund described the results as “bipartisan support for U.S. innovation.” That reading is strongest on crypto’s narrow 15%-to-13% split. The 45%-to-30% result on the wider fintech proposition shows why the survey does not establish a common mandate for crypto-specific policy.

Ipsos polled 1,545 adults from Sept. 8 to 16 on its KnowledgePanel, the probability-based panel the Federal Reserve uses for its household finance survey. The survey carries a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points.

Other responses point toward security and personal control over financial choices. Some 63% said the financial system needs an upgrade to address threats such as AI and cybercrime, while 49% said the government should not decide which products they can invest in.

Together with the ranking above, those results suggest that voters care more about security and control than about crypto itself.

What does this change for crypto businesses?

The Clarity Act defeat has already changed the industry’s route to federal rules. The bill would have set rules for crypto markets, but it failed a key Senate vote in September amid disputes over ethics provisions covering President Donald Trump’s crypto interests.

Since then, the industry has turned to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to write the rules instead. For market participants, that shifts the near-term policy watch from congressional passage of the Clarity Act to the SEC and CFTC rulemaking processes. The industry does not yet have the federal rules the failed Senate vote had proposed.

The spending and survey do not establish a broad mandate for crypto-specific rules. They show an industry committing substantial campaign resources while voters give crypto much less priority than fintech in general. For practitioners, the distinction is between support for U.S. financial-technology builders and expressed demand for crypto-specific policy.

The immediate deadline arrives with the midterm votes in the following week. Beyond that ballot, the market-structure change to watch is the transfer of rule-setting from the failed Clarity Act debate to SEC and CFTC proceedings.