WASHINGTON — The crypto industry has spent about $176 million across more than 100 congressional races ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections, according to a Reuters review reported on November 1, 2026, in one of the largest single-industry bets on the shape of the next Congress. The spending, led by the super PAC Fairshake, is aimed at preserving a friendly regulatory environment for digital assets at a moment when the industry’s flagship bill in the Senate has stalled and the party balance of Congress is about to be redrawn.
The scale of the effort is striking even by the standards of recent elections. In 2024, Fairshake spent about $133 million on 68 races, including $40 million on a successful bid to unseat then-Senate Banking Committee Chairman Sherrod Brown. That payoff, in the industry’s telling, was the later passage of the Genius Act, a 2025 law that set federal rules for stablecoins. The Genius Act, however, did not settle the industry’s top priorities, including who may be paid interest on the reserve assets that back stablecoins. The bill meant to answer those questions, the CLARITY Act, failed a Senate procedural vote on September 15, 2026, falling 49-50 when it needed 60 votes to advance. The $176 million now being spent is, in effect, a bet on the next Congress being more willing to finish that job.
Fairshake says it supports candidates of either party who back clear rules for crypto, and its spending has indeed flowed to both parties. But the political context gives the effort a particular edge in 2026. Control of the House and Senate will be decided on November 3, and the industry’s own analysts warn that the outcome will determine whether crypto legislation becomes easier or harder over the next two years. A policy note from TD Cowen analyst Jaret Seiberg, cited in recent coverage, warned that a Democratic sweep of both chambers would make passage more difficult, in part because Democrats have continued to demand ethics provisions preventing senior officials, including the president, from profiting from crypto businesses. Republicans and industry groups oppose such restrictions, and that disagreement was a central sticking point in the Senate’s September failure.
How crypto super PAC spending shapes Congress races
Super PACs like Fairshake do not give money directly to candidates. They spend independently, typically on advertising for or against candidates, and they may raise unlimited sums from corporations, unions and individuals. That independence is what allows a single industry to become a major presence in more than 100 races at once, including races where crypto itself is barely mentioned in the advertising. Voters in those districts may see ads about a candidate’s record on the economy, on regulation or on consumer protection without ever hearing the word “crypto” — which is precisely why campaign-finance analysts track the spending even when the ads do not name the industry behind them.
Ohio offers the clearest example of how the money connects to a specific Senate contest. Brown, who lost his seat in 2024 after the industry spent heavily against him, is running again in 2026 against Republican Senator Jon Husted, and the race is among the most expensive Senate contests in the country. Our earlier coverage has tracked the contest as a dead heat in its final days, in the Ohio Senate race between Brown and Husted, and as a fight worth hundreds of millions of dollars in total spending, in our report on Ohio’s $435 million Senate fight. Brown chaired the Senate Banking Committee and was among the industry’s toughest critics while in office, and he would be a major voice on crypto legislation if he returns. Husted, by contrast, is the incumbent the industry would prefer to keep in place. The Ohio result will therefore be read in crypto circles not only as a Senate outcome but as a verdict on whether the industry’s 2024 investment still pays.
The CLARITY Act’s own history explains why the industry is spending so heavily now rather than waiting for a friendlier moment. The House passed its version of the bill 294-134 in July 2025, and the Senate Banking Committee advanced its own version 15-9 in May 2026, with two Democrats on board. But on the Senate floor, every Democrat and independent voted against cloture, joined by four Republicans — Susan Collins, Josh Hawley, Jerry Moran and Thom Tillis — and the motion failed 49-50. Tillis’s no vote was tactical: voting with the majority against cloture allowed him to file a motion to reconsider, keeping the bill alive without restarting the procedural clock. The bill is therefore not formally dead, and a second cloture vote in the lame-duck session remains possible. But the maths has not changed, and the industry knows that a new Senate, seated in January, could make the maths worse rather than better.
What the industry wants from the next Congress
At its core, the CLARITY Act would divide oversight of digital assets between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defining which assets count as securities, which count as commodities and how exchanges, brokers and dealers should be regulated. That division matters enormously to crypto firms, because the two regulators operate under different rules, different disclosure requirements and different enforcement cultures. A firm that knows which regulator governs its token can plan, raise money and build products with far more confidence than a firm that faces the risk of an enforcement action from either agency. The September failure left that uncertainty in place, and regulators have continued to develop their own rules in the meantime, including Securities and Exchange Commission proposals on crypto-asset regulation and Commodity Futures Trading Commission notices that run into December.
The ethics dispute that helped sink the bill is not a side issue. Democrats argue that senior officials, including the president, should not be able to profit from crypto businesses while shaping the rules for them, and they point to reporting that President Donald Trump earned about $1.4 billion in crypto-related income last year. Republicans and industry groups counter that the ethics provisions demanded by Democrats go too far and would chill legitimate participation in the market. Until that disagreement is bridged, no amount of campaign spending can by itself produce 60 Senate votes, because the bill’s opponents include Democrats whose votes would be needed even in a Republican-held Senate. That is why analysts describe the election as shaping the schedule and direction of crypto regulation rather than settling it outright.
Why $176 million may matter less than the Senate maths
There is a temptation to treat campaign spending as a direct purchase of legislation, but the record is more complicated. Fairshake’s 2024 spending helped remove a powerful critic from the Banking Committee, yet the CLARITY Act still failed in the Senate two years later, because the votes for cloture were not there even with a Republican majority. Spending can shape who sits in Congress, but it cannot conjure 60 votes out of a divided chamber, and it cannot resolve a substantive policy dispute about ethics and stablecoin interest. What it can do is ensure that the candidates who win are at least open to the industry’s arguments, and that the next Congress begins its crypto debate with a larger pool of sympathetic members than it would otherwise have.
That is also why the final Federal Election Commission reports, due after the election, will be watched as closely as the results themselves. They will show not only how much Fairshake and its allied groups spent, but where they spent it, which races they prioritised in the final weeks, and whether their late money flowed to races that turned out to be decisive for control of Congress. If the industry’s favoured candidates win in the races that decide the majority, the $176 million will be described as money well spent. If they lose, it will be described as a warning about the limits of even the largest campaign war chest. Either way, the spending has already changed the 2026 campaign: it made crypto regulation, an issue that rarely decides elections on its own, into one of the most expensive background forces in the fight for Congress. The question for the next Congress is whether that force can translate into the 60 Senate votes that the CLARITY Act still lacks.
Sources
USN reviewed reporting from multiple outlets for this story. Read more from The Motley Fool, TokenPost and Digital Today.