Crypto PAC jumps into 2024, opposing Porter for Senate
The biggest name and the biggest spender of crypto money in the 2022 election cycle is now awaiting his prison sentence for fraud and conspiracy. But new super political action committees have sprouted up as the successors to the collapsed Sam Bankman-Fried empire, and they are making their first big bet of the 2024 election cycle: trying to crush Representative Katie Porter, a Democrat running in next month’s California Senate primary.
The biggest new crypto-focused super PAC, Fairshake, began reserving television and digital advertising across California in a multimillion-dollar buy late Monday, and it could be a major player in the race’s final three weeks.
Fairshake revealed two weeks ago in federal filings that it and two affiliated super PACs had amassed a combined roughly $80 million in 2023, with most of the money coming from three major cryptocurrency players: Coinbase, Ripple Labs, and Andreessen Horowitz.
The California Senate race pits Porter against Representative Adam Schiff, a Democrat, and Representative Barbara
Lee, another Democrat, as well as Steve Garvey, a Republican and a former baseball player. The top two finishers in the March primary will advance to November, even if both are Democrats.
In a statement, Fairshake accused Porter of taking campaign cash from other industries and misleading the state about her record, saying, “Katie Porter says one thing and does another.”
The group is planning a blitz of anti-Porter advertising. The ad released on Tuesday begins, “Katie Porter plays us for fools,” and accuses her of accepting some donations from industry executives.
It is not exactly clear what about Porter has drawn the crypto industry’s ire, other than her record as a progressive who favored regulating the industry to better favor consumers and made the grilling of a financial chief executive a viral moment a few years ago.
“Californians aren’t fooled: Shadowy crypto billionaires don’t want a strong voice for consumers in the Senate,” Porter wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, after The New York Times reported on the advertising blitz. “They fear people who call out corporate greed, so they’re spending millions on dishonest dark-money ads against me.”
The crypto financiers behind Fairshake and its two affiliated groups, Protect Progress and Defend American Jobs, are fairly open about their agenda: to ensure a favorable set of regulations as the federal government considers how to regulate the crypto industry and to use political spending to get it.
On Capitol Hill, Porter has been a close ally of Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who was once her professor at Harvard Law School. Warren has been an outspoken critic of the lax regulations around cryptocurrency, and Porter once signed onto a letter with Warren to Texas regulators about cryptocurrency, according to the crypto news-tracking site Bitcoin.com.