The Crypto Industry’s Plan To Sink Unfriendly Democrats Is Backfiring

“What they're doing in trying to affect and buy an election by coming in and spending $10 million at the last minute — all it did was turn voters against them,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth told HuffPost.

WASHINGTON — Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) survived more than $1 million in spending against him by the cryptocurrency industry in his Democratic primary earlier this month. Green said he now feels “liberated.”

“Today, I am going to embrace the topic that has caused a good deal of consternation in this Congress, a topic that many people would say it would be injudicious to embrace, because of the consequences,” Green said in a speech on the House floor Thursday. “Why is the crypto industry spending mega millions of dollars to control Congress?”

Most Democrats have spent the months since the 2024 election aiming to avoid angering the crypto industry, especially after it made an example out of former Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) by spending millions of dollars on ads attacking them before they lost their races. But recent Democratic primaries may have sown the seeds of an eventual Democratic backlash.

Green surprisingly managed to advance to his runoff against freshman Rep. Christian Menefee despite the crypto intervention. And crypto’s heavy spending in a pair of races in Illinois not only failed to defeat candidates there, it also angered the state’s elected officials.

“What they’re doing in trying to affect and buy an election by coming in and spending $10 million at the last minute — all it did was turn voters against them,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) told HuffPost. “All it did was make me think twice about what they’re willing to do to further the industry and reduce the guardrails around them. And so if anything, they hurt their cause with what they did in Chicago, in Illinois.”