Democrats on opposite sides of cryptocurrency regulation debates agree on one thing: Crypto is an incredibly useful political messaging tool. They just can’t agree on how to use it.
Industry lobbyists and supportive lawmakers have argued the road to Democratic comeback is paved with crypto-friendly legislation — insisting that embracing digital assets will win back voters Democrats ceded to President Donald Trump in 2024, especially young men.
Crypto skeptics in Congress see the issue as a powerful weapon in painting Trump as a corrupt and greedy leader, tying industry-backed legislation to the president and his family’s own recently lucrative crypto ventures.
The latter camp won out in the Senate last week when Democrats blocked the advancement of the GENIUS Act, a previously bipartisan bill regulating stablecoins, a type of digital asset whose value is tied to another asset, like the dollar.
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But the intra-party war over how to legislate around crypto — and how to message about it to win elections — isn’t going away anytime soon.
Industry and allied Democrats still attempting to pass the GENIUS Act are combating messaging tying the legislation to presidential corruption — a campaign spearheaded by progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
“She raised an anti-crypto army,” said Kara Calvert, vice president of U.S. policy at Coinbase. “This is not surprising that she would activate all of her people around town. And there were a lot of them, many of those people who were in the previous administration, and they activated — and they activated aggressively.”
There’s no shortage of ethically fraught entanglements between Trump and the crypto industry for Warren’s camp to point to. Trump-affiliated LLCs launched his lucrative-for-a-few memecoins through which top purchasers could buy their way to a private dinner with him next week. His family’s crypto company launched a stablecoin shortly after the GENIUS Act passed through a Senate committee. And a United Arab Emirates-backed investment firm is using the Trump family’s stablecoin to make a $2 billion investment.
Progressives seized onto crypto as a key anti-Trump messaging mantle. Justice Democrats accused Sen. Chuck Schumer of leading Democrats to “rubberstamp Trump’s crypto corruption AND giving the Crypto lobby exactly what they want.” (Schumer later voted against the bill, but has signaled he may support a future version).
This week, the progressive group Our Revolution held an organizing call with Sens. Jeff Merkley and Warren again tying Trump’s ventures to crypto legislation — what the call organizers called “the unholy alliance between the crypto oligarchs and President Trump.”
“I get it, crypto’s kind of a tricky topic and it’s not one that a lot of people on this call have traditionally engaged on or organized around,” Warren told the group. “But we just have to face the fact that this is an industry that has pumped money into our elections to get friendly-to-them people elected.”
Crypto-affiliated PACs spent more than $180 million in elections last cycle. Now, industry lobbyists and their Democratic supporters are conversely trying to convince lawmakers that these are distractions from the “far left” and that crypto-passionate voters could be recouped from Republicans in future elections.
“You see key constituencies of the Democratic base: young people, African Americans, Latinos really find cryptocurrency and blockchain appealing,” said John Anzalone, Joe Biden’s chief 2020 pollster.
“Crypto voters tend to see Republicans because Donald Trump was so vocal about it, so they see the Republicans as more pro-crypto,” he added. “But you have to understand, I think that this is in the very infancy stage, and so Democrats can very much capture parity.”
Other close watchers say neither political message — one focused on enabling “Trump’s crypto corruption” camp, nor the industry-backed bills — is actually the right messaging vehicle to capture crypto-focused voters for Democrats.
“There’s only been one perspective that’s been overwhelmingly normalized, and that’s the lobbyist perspective. And it’s that Democrats are coming after you and the thing that you care about, and that’s just like a big echo chamber with no way of rebutting that, because the Democrats have not rebutted it,” said Hermine Wong, former Coinbase policy team lead and lecturer at UC Berkeley Law.
Wong has argued that “Democrats’ path to 2026 victory goes through decentralized crypto.” She doesn’t see Democrats’ lining up behind the GENIUS Act as a solution — a bill she describes as primarily benefiting the corporate middlemen like Coinbase that collect fees on transactions — but says lumping crypto in with Trump and corruption isn’t the messaging solution either.
“It’s worse than just ceding the ground, it just cedes it to say, ‘And therefore if you own crypto, you’re basically some sort of corrupt, scamming, MAGA,’ whatever it may be. And that’s just not true.”
Meanwhile, the Republicans who are pushing the legislation say Democrats’ opposition isn’t about crypto at all.
“When we began the negotiations, I thought it was sincere, and I don’t think it’s sincere anymore,” GENIUS Act sponsor Sen. Cynthia Lummis told NOTUS as it failed on the floor last week. “I think they hate Republicans.”
But with Trump pressuring Congress to get crypto legislation to his desk by August, he’s an unavoidable factor in Democrats’ political message either way.
“The president has made that very clear to Republicans that they want to accomplish that,” Calvert said. “And I say Republicans because, obviously, I’m not sure Democrats are interested in handing President Trump a win on this.”
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Claire Heddles is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
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