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Advocates at Stand With Crypto Seek to Turn Crypto Enthusiasts Into Swing-State Voters
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Jesse Hamilton
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Crypto political advocacy group Stand With Crypto is starting up its tour across several key states in the November general election, beginning next week in Arizona.
The organization has gathered more than a million online signups from people interested in digital assets and says it hopes to get them into the voting booths later this year.
Stand With Crypto is the political cheerleading arm of the crypto industry’s increasingly high-powered effort to insert itself into the 2024 election, and it’s starting a multi-state tour on Sept. 4 with the hope of translating its 1.3 million online signups into pro-cryptocurrency votes.
Its first stop in Arizona will feature U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) and a top Republican state legislator, Arizona House Speaker Pro Tempore Travis Grantham, along with crypto businesspeople, according to the organization. After that event in Phoenix, Stand With Crypto will hit several other potential tossup states in the election, hosting similar events in Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
“There’s a large group of people who are into crypto,” said Logan Dobson, the group’s executive director, said in an interview. “It’s our job to use sort of campaign-style tactics to motivate them to vote.”
“Crypto voters are already, I think, decently fired-up about this election,” Dobson added.
Stand With Crypto has amassed almost 27,000 signups of Arizona crypto supporters to its website, it says, and the group’s studies of those individuals indicates more than 80% may be registered voters. Fewer than 11,000 votes separated former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden when Biden won that state in 2020.
Arizona has already represented a crypto political battleground. One of the industry’s favored candidates, Yassamin Ansari, won her congressional primary with 39 votes over a candidate who railed against her support from crypto interests and had been endorsed by crypto critic Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)
In presidential election polling, Arizona so far has Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump running neck-and-neck, with most of the recent polls suggesting they’re within a percentage point of each other. Between them, only Trump has made pro-crypto pronouncements, though Harris’ camp has reportedly been open to a friendlier digital assets stance than Biden’s administration.
The digital assets industry’s top political action committee (PAC), Fairshake, has said it’s committing $3 million each to advocate for U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) in the Arizona Senate race and Rep. Elisa Slotkin (D-Mich.) in her Senate race in Michigan. The announcement drew frustration from crypto’s Republican supporters, even as Fairshake and its affiliate PACs attracted similar heat from Democrats when it committed $12 million to get Republican crypto fan Bernie Moreno, the opponent of powerful Senate Banking Committee Chairman Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), elected in Ohio.
Stand With Crypto, which doesn’t have a direct affiliation with Fairshake despite Coinbase being a prominent backer of both, is also working on Ohio plans, Dobson said. The state is “definitely a priority” for the organization, he said.
