With Midterms Looming, the Crypto Industry Is Mobilizing to Maintain a Pro-Crypto Regulatory Environment. History Says This Happens Next.

Can big political donations lead to big political outcomes for the crypto industry? The assumption seems to be yes, as ahead of the Nov. 3 midterms in the U.S., crypto lobbying groups have spent about $176 million across more than 100 congressional races, according to a Reuters review.

But astute readers will point out that similar efforts haven't always led to the policies that crypto companies were looking for in the past, including quite recently. For instance, on Sept. 15, the Senate failed to advance the Clarity Act, which would have divided crypto oversight between the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) while setting rules for market structure. So, how is this next round of campaign contributions going to play out?

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Crypto-backed candidates won 53 of 58 races in 2026, but laws come slowly

The short version here is that in the past the crypto industry's election money has been effective at buying allies, and less effective at buying laws that are to the industry's liking, and even then only slowly at best.

Fairshake is the industry's largest super PAC, and it's the lead organization in the lobbying effort.

Its network spent $150.8 million on races this cycle through Oct. 20, and in the primary and special election campaigns it funded, 53 of 58 of its chosen candidates won. The PAC's top funders are Coinbase Global (NASDAQ: COIN), Ripple, which issues XRP, and the venture capital group Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).

In 2024, Fairshake spent about $133 million on a total of 68 races, including a whopping $40 million on a successful bid to unseat then-Senate Banking Committee Chairman Sherrod Brown. The payoff for that investment was the later passage of the Genius Act, a 2025 law that set the federal rules for stablecoins.

Still, the Genius Act didn't fully address some of the industry's top priorities, like the matter of who is allowed to be paid the interest on the reserve assets that back the value of stablecoins. The Clarity Act was supposed to settle that question. During its cloture vote in the Senate, the Act only got 49 of the 60 votes it needed, with the main sticking point being ethics rules about government officials profiting from crypto.

Although recently the Republican Party has been more receptive to the crypto industry's requests and donations, in this election cycle, the donations are being used to build a bipartisan pro-crypto bloc. Fairshake is backing 32 incumbents in the House, of whom 19 are Republicans and 13 are Democrats.

Does crypto really need a friendly Congress to thrive?

As much as the crypto industry is willing to spend millions on influencing the political process to its favor, history says that the crypto markets haven't needed a permissive regulatory environment or friendly legislation to flourish in the past.

In 2023, the SEC brought 46 enforcement actions against actors in crypto, the most in any single year. That same year, Bitcoin climbed by 155%. The huge volume of the crypto industry's complaints about regulations and regulators in that period thus had little to no impact on returns of major assets.

Plus, the crypto market has its own fits and phases regardless of who is in power or in what position.

In 2025, Donald Trump was branded as the "crypto president," yet Bitcoin still crashed and entered into a bear market in early October of that year.

So don't buy or sell anything because of the election or its outcomes. It's true that an overtly hostile Congress might make it harder to pass a new version of the Clarity Act, but if history is any guide, fear about crypto being banned or choked by burdensome rules is usually overblown.

Alex Carchidi has positions in Bitcoin. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Bitcoin and XRP. The Motley Fool recommends Coinbase Global. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.