Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said the crypto industry's lopsided political spending has alienated the Democratic lawmakers whose votes it needs to pass federal crypto legislation. Cuomo made the remarks on Tuesday during a panel with OKX CEO Star Xu at the Token2049 conference.

Crypto-focused political action committees tracked by Tech Influence Watch have spent $54.3 million supporting Republicans in the 2026 election cycle, against $26.2 million supporting Democrats, according to the tracker's latest figures checked Thursday. A further $23.2 million has gone toward opposing Democrats.

The industry, Cuomo said, "believed in investing heavily in the Republican Party" as a route to passing the CLARITY Act, the market-structure bill that cleared the House in July 2025 but remains stalled in the Senate.

"When you invest heavily in the Republican Party, by definition, you're going to alienate Democrats," Cuomo said at the panel.

Why does partisan tilt threaten the CLARITY Act?

The arithmetic of Congress leaves the industry little room for one-party alignment. Cuomo argued that a Democratic-controlled Congress could either move to roll back federal agencies' crypto initiatives or negotiate with the Trump administration to pass the CLARITY Act in full — but either path requires bipartisan goodwill.

"You need Democrats to pass the bill. You need Republicans. You have to be more balanced," he said.

As of Thursday, a Kalshi prediction market put the probability of Democrats winning both chambers of Congress at about 61%, raising the stakes for an industry that has concentrated its financial firepower on one side of the aisle.

The legislative record shows crypto bills have drawn genuine Democratic support, even as Republican caucuses stayed more united. In July 2025, 78 House Democrats joined 216 Republicans to pass the CLARITY Act, while 134 Democrats voted against it. In the Senate, 18 Democrats backed the GENIUS Act, the stablecoin bill that passed in June 2025.

The Senate's September procedural vote on the CLARITY Act underscored the fragility of that coalition. All Senate Democrats and four Republicans voted against advancing the bill, though many objections at the time centered on potential conflicts of interest involving President Donald Trump's crypto businesses rather than the bill's substance. Seven Democratic senators subsequently issued a joint statement reaffirming their commitment to passing the legislation.

Are Democrats actually anti-crypto?

Cuomo rejected the framing that Democratic opposition to the industry's agenda reflects hostility to the technology itself.

"There's a sense that Democrats are anti-crypto," he said, before arguing the opposite case: "As a matter of fact, I could argue that the crypto technology is exactly suited to the Democratic Party. It's empowering people who otherwise wouldn't have access to financial products, and the Democratic Party has been working to do that all its life."

For an industry weighing its election-cycle strategy, the spending gap is already narrowing at the margins. Fairshake, the sector's most prominent PAC, said Monday it will support 32 House candidates in November's midterm elections — 19 Republicans and 13 Democrats, a split that suggests the industry's own operatives recognize the coalition math Cuomo described.

The immediate question is timing. With the CLARITY Act stalled in the Senate and midterms roughly a year out, the industry has a narrowing window to rebuild Democratic support before a potentially Democratic-controlled Congress decides whether to finish the bill or unwind what regulators have already built.