Crypto PACs Dominate Ohio Senate Race, Spending $40M on Sherrod Brown's Foe

Money from the political action committees backed by such crypto firms as Coinbase and Ripple Labs is helping lift the Republican challenger against Sen. Sherrod Brown, who chairs the Senate Banking Committee where crypto bills have languished.

Blockchain businessman Bernie Moreno has experienced a rapid rise in polling, some of which now put the Republican candidate atop Brown in the battleground state of Ohio.

The colossal campaign spending from the cryptocurrency industry is showing up in dominant fashion in Ohio’s U.S. Senate race, where its political action committees have devoted $40 million to support Republican Bernie Moreno’s opposition of Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), the crypto-skeptical chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.

In the largest single outlay of campaign spending from the digital assets sector, the latest Federal Election Commission filings show Fairshake PAC and its affiliates – specifically Defend American Jobs – have far outdistanced the initial $12 million the group announced at the start of its Ohio engagement. The spending, which has been devoted to pro-Moreno advertising, is the most any group has so far committed to this battleground.

Since Fairshake weighed in last month, the sentiment of Ohio voters has shown a major leap for blockchain businessman Moreno. At the start of August, he was at 39.6% support in one industry poll of likely voters obtained by CoinDesk, compared with 48.3% for Brown. The latest polling by ActiVote shows Moreno potentially pulling ahead with 51% to Brown’s 49%, though that poll carried an almost 5% margin of error.

A broader average of polling also suggests steady gains for Moreno, with a 2.3 percentage point increase since Fairshake leapt into Ohio, according to the running tally of polls maintained by FiveThirtyEight.com, a political analysis site.

Some crypto insiders have expressed private discomfort with Fairshake’s decision to try to dethrone Brown, who currently has control of a significant segment of the Senate’s crypto agenda. If Brown wins, and the Senate remains under a Democratic majority, he’ll retain that authority, and this open warfare could hurt the industry’s legislative drive. The decision had already cost the goodwill of one of Fairshake’s significant donors and has resulted in ill will among high-profile Democrats.

Fairshake spokesman Josh Vlasto declined to comment on the Ohio strategy.

The outside spending in that state is going far toward bridging what is otherwise a massive gap in direct contributions to the candidates, meaning the fully disclosed individual contributions that are subject to spending limits and the full range of legal restrictions in U.S. elections laws. Veteran lawmaker Brown has received about $53 million, according to the most recent federal records, versus $16 million for Moreno.

Super PACs like Fairshake are only able to target candidates with so-called independent expenditures – advertising and other services that have no direct affiliation with or approval from the campaigns. In some races, Fairshake has spent millions on negative ads to oppose candidates that don’t support pro-crypto policies, but in this one, the ads are positive in bolstering Moreno, an Ohio businessman and crypto enthusiast who founded a blockchain startup that focuses on property titles.

If Brown loses, the chances get much higher that Republicans take the Senate majority, and Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) potentially becomes the next chairman. Though Scott’s crypto views had long been muted, he recently cheered on digital assets innovations at the Nashville Bitcoin 2024 event, and at a symposium in Wyoming hosted by the SALT Conference, he floated a crypto-specific subcommittee if he wins the gavel.

“We have to get rid of the folks who are in the way,” Scott said in Nashville.

Fairshake made a splash when it quickly outpaced other industry PACs for the amount of cash it stockpiled for the 2024 elections: $169 million. It’s used that war chest on candidates it considers good for the industry, and to oppose those who wouldn’t be – especially if they’ve been backed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)

Despite Fairshake’s origin – mostly funded by some of the crypto sector’s most prominent names, including Coinbase Inc., Ripple Labs and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) – the ads don’t typically mention digital assets at all.

The industry’s favored candidates have won in about two dozen primary elections, meaning pro-crypto candidates will occupy a greater share of the seats of Congress next year. Since both the Senate and House of Representatives have been considered vulnerable to a reversal of their majorities, every shift in the landscape is potentially significant. Democrats have been holding onto the Senate with the barest possible majority – the tie-breaking vote of the vice president in an otherwise 50-50 split between the parties.