Crypto voter polls don’t tell story crypto bros think they do

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Crypto voters are making the 2024 United States election a crypto referendum, at least, according to crypto companies seeking looser crypto regulations.

A flurry of new crypto-focused polls and surveys continue to try to put their thumb on the electoral scales ahead of November’s vote. The goal is to build on the manufactured perception that a handful of crypto-focused voters will tip the balance in the handful of battleground states that will decide who becomes America’s next president.

Stand With Crypto, the astroturf group posing as a grassroots organization and funded by the Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) exchange, issued a ’10 Things You Should Know About the Crypto Voter’ report that repeats the industry mantra that “crypto owners will vote for crypto friendly candidates in November.”

The survey (conducted by Morning Consult) also claims that “crypto owners embrace American values.” Said values include ‘freedom,’ just in case you were worried that crypto owners were diehard opponents of the 13th Amendment.

The survey repeats some of Coinbase’s previous falsehoods, including the 2023 claim that 52 million Americans—roughly 15% of the population—own crypto. By contrast, a Federal Reserve survey from the same year found crypto ownership at a mere 7%, and that was five points lower than two years earlier.

Regardless, Coinbase is using its previous erroneous claim to justify its new erroneous claim that the number of crypto owners in seven battleground states is “more than 16 times the vote differential combined in these states in the 2020 Presidential election.”

Among the more credible claims in the latest survey is that crypto voters “are just as likely to vote for Kamala Harris as they are Donald Trump,” with the survey showing each candidate garnering an equal 47% of voters’ support.

However, the survey was conducted in late August, weeks before Harris had made any specific pro-crypto comments—and even those were fairly bland, particularly compared to Trump’s full-throated embrace of anything that might make him money.

In other words, those supposedly single-issue crypto voters determined to vote for the crypto-friendly candidate were evenly split despite Harris offering no clear endorsement of crypto technology at the time.

That kinda torpedoes Coinbase’s message that a candidate’s crypto stance will tilt the election one way or the other. Seems crypto voters aren’t the single-issue automatons that Coinbase would prefer the candidates believe.

As the Financial Times’ Jemima Kelly recently phrased it, “the crypto voter is not, in any substantive sense, real. Aside from the small group of men (OK, mainly men) whose livelihoods now depend on this digitally indigenous fluff, most Americans have rather bigger things to worry about.”

Well informed, well, if we have to be

A separate survey conducted by The Harris Poll on behalf of Digital Currency Group’s (DCG) Grayscale Investments unit somehow found that 56% of voters are more likely to vote for a candidate who is “informed about crypto.” The poll, conducted in early September, also found that 40% of voters are “paying attention to candidates’ positions on Bitcoin and/or other crypto assets in this election compared to all other previous elections.”

And yet, here too the figures show an evenly split electorate, with the allegedly anti-crypto Democrats (45%) actually outpacing Republicans (42%) on which party is ‘more favorable’ towards crypto. Remember, this poll was also conducted prior to Harris’s meek pro-crypto comments.

The poll says 77% of voters agree with the statement that candidates “should have an informed perspective on innovative technology, like AI or crypto.” This is a phenomenally bland statement, and yet 23% of voters appear to prefer a candidate who chooses to remain ignorant on new developments. Don’t ever change, ‘Murica.

We’re still early, bro

Still, another new survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s Consumer Finance Institute (CFI), asked the question: Do Price Changes Affect Crypto Ownership? Sadly for crypto bros, the data shows that, despite the significant rise in the BTC token’s fiat price since the ‘crypto winter’ days of late 2022, this growth “has not been accompanied by an increase in ownership in our survey population.”

Indeed, the CFI found that there was a 60% rise in BTC’s fiat price between October 2023 and January 2024, and yet the BTC ownership rate actually fell by 1.6 percentage points to 15.5% over this span. By April 2024, BTC had enjoyed a further “significant increase in value” but ownership rose only 0.6 points. And ownership fell back to 14.7% by July 2024.

This study adds weight to data showing decreased retail consumer activity at exchanges like Coinbase, which suggests that BTC’s price gains are due to other factors. These factors likely include billions in late-night BTC binge-shopping by Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy (NASDAQ: MSTR), Wall Street giants adding to their exchange traded fund reserves, and good old fashioned wash trading by the usual market-manipulating suspects.

Let’s all go to the lobby

Meanwhile, the Fairshake pro-crypto political action committee (PAC) and its offshoots—the pro-GOP Defend American Jobs and the pro-Dem Protect Progress—continue to spend like drunken sailors as the clock counts down to November 5.

Fairshake et al rarely (if ever) mention digital assets in the political ads they fund, regardless of whether those ads are promoting a crypto backer or denigrating an opponent. This is further evidence that Fairshake’s backers—Coinbase, Ripple, a16z, Gemini, Kraken and others—know how little influence ‘crypto’ actually has on the average voter, and that much of the electorate continues to hold a negative view of the sector.

In Ohio, Fairshake et al have spent $40 million boosting GOP candidate Bernie Moreno’s bid to defeat incumbent Sen. Sherrod Brown, the anti-crypto chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. Recent polls show a dead heat between the two candidates, with Moreno having erased a significant disadvantage since the race began.

That $40 million outlay is a significant gain on the $12 million the crypto PACs originally pledged to support Moreno, suggesting that Fairshake et al aren’t leaving things up to chance. But Fairshake’s desire to see Brown go down to defeat cost it a major backer this summer when Silicon Valley investor Ron Conway condemned the “short sighted and stupid” strategy and withdrew his support.

Conway’s contribution was quickly made up by digital wallet provider Exodus, which on September 24 announced it was donating $1.3 million to Coinbase’s Stand With Crypto group to “help support their mission of educating and mobilizing crypto voters around the country.”

Stand With Crypto rates politicians/candidates’ support for/antagonism toward digital assets, using an A to F letter grade. This rating system came under fire last week when the group gave Kamala Harris a ‘B’ rating based on her recent “somewhat supportive” statements.

Reaction was swift, as Crypto Twitter erupted in outrage at Harris getting a ‘B’ based off some vague blockchain platitudes. A chastened Stand With Crypto issued a statement saying it had “updated our scorecard & now requires additional clarity from candidates up & down the ballot in order to qualify for a letter grade.”

Careful what you wish for

Amid all the conjecture about which presidential candidate will prove ‘better’ for the digital asset sector, the chances of digital asset legislation being passed in the post-election ‘lame duck’ session of Congress remain anyone’s guess. Lame ducks are notorious for last-minute stapling of controversial bills onto must-pass bills because everybody just wants to get out of D.C. and go home for the holidays.

How each party fares at the ballot box could also impact legislative progress, as Republicans stand a good chance of retaking the Senate. Should they also retain control of the House, they would be in a better position to pass legislation that better fits their desires without the need to incorporate Dem-favored guardrails.

If a bill does make it through the lame duck, it will likely be one of two candidates. The first is FIT21, which divides regulatory responsibilities between the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), with the SEC taking a decidedly junior role.

The other possibility is one of the so-called ‘payment stablecoin’ bills that favor domestic stablecoins such as USDC (issued by Circle via a partnership with Coinbase) over international crime coins like USDT (Tether). But even that may prove too tough a slog in one of the least productive and most dysfunctional legislative sessions in Congressional history.

And should Fairshake et al succeed in ousting Brown, chances are high that he’ll adopt a ‘from hell’s heart, I stab at thee’ approach that could doom any bill from making it past his committee. Even if a bill came to a floor vote, his Senate colleagues could choose to rally around their fallen comrade, safe in the knowledge that Fairshake et al couldn’t do any more damage until the 2026 mid-terms.

One token over the line

Meanwhile, the Trump family’s decentralized finance (DeFi) project World Liberty Financial (WLF) took another step closer to its official launch by inviting would-be users to begin their know your customer (KYC) verification. Donald himself invited prospective WLF customers to “be part of this historic moment” and “help make America the crypto capital of the world.”

As recently disclosed by WLF’s sketchy AF leadership, U.S. residents must prove that they meet the requirements of an ‘accredited investor,’ including a net worth over $1 million or annual income over $200,000. There are similar restrictions on U.K. customers who must have “professional experience in matters relating to investments who fall within the definition of ‘investment professional’” in U.K. financial regs.

There are less stringent requirements for other international investors, so heads up to all you foreign potentates looking for ways to give Donald money without violating U.S. campaign finance laws (and who don’t want to buy any of his cheesy Trump Watches).

While WLF collects its investor info, these investors are still no clearer on what WLF actually is or does. We know that there will be a non-transferrable ‘governance’ token (WLFI) that won’t offer any yield, only the right to vote on the project’s future decisions. Given the ‘crypto’ world’s alleged interest in knowing where their candidates stand, voting for WLF clarity would be a good place to start.

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