Earlier this month, we covered the roughly $206 million crypto industry groups had pushed toward passing the CLARITY Act — money spent on a bill that failed its Senate cloture vote anyway. New campaign-finance reporting puts that figure in a bigger frame: crypto, AI, and sports-betting super PACs have combined for at least $294 million in spending tied to the 2026 midterms specifically, as part of a broader $517 million in corporate political spending on House and Senate races since January 2025 — against a backdrop of roughly $11.6 billion expected in total political advertising across the cycle.
Crypto's war chest, updated
Fairshake, the crypto industry's flagship super PAC funded by Coinbase, Ripple, and Andreessen Horowitz, started this cycle with $193 million and still holds roughly $130 million unspent — a reminder that the CLARITY Act loss didn't drain the industry's political capacity, it just meant the money didn't buy the outcome this round. Andreessen Horowitz's co-founders have also made personal donations of $4 million apiece, mostly directed to MAGA Inc., separate from Fairshake's own spending.
New money at the table: AI and sports betting
What's changed since our earlier piece is how much company crypto now has. Leading the Future, an AI-industry super PAC, has raised $140 million; Public First Action, an Anthropic-backed nonprofit, raised $100 million, including a $40 million contribution from Anthropic itself. OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman and his wife have personally donated $25 million to MAGA Inc. Sports-betting operators — DraftKings, FanDuel, Fanatics, and bet365 — have combined for $72 million, largely routed through affiliate PACs like American Conservative Fund and American Future. Polymarket, the prediction-market platform, contributed $1 million to the Congressional Leadership Fund.
“The scale of corporate spending in this election cycle is unlike anything we've seen previously,” said Rick Claypool, research director at Public Citizen.
Where it's actually landing
The clearest precedent for what this money can do is the 2024 Ohio Senate race, where crypto-backed spending helped defeat incumbent Sherrod Brown. More recently, a New York City House primary saw two Democratic candidates receive a combined $23 million from competing AI-industry groups in a single month — a race one campaign-finance researcher described as "basically two AI groups having it out with each other," with the candidates themselves treated as secondary to the fight.
Why this connects back to CLARITY
Fairshake's calculus going forward reportedly hinges on how individual senators voted on cloture: industry sources have said they need a recorded vote before deciding whether to concentrate spending against Democrats who blocked the bill or continue backing a bipartisan mix of crypto-friendly lawmakers. With the SEC and CFTC now both moving on their own crypto rules — see our coverage of the SEC's tokenized-stock exemption and the CFTC's rulemaking push — the industry has less urgent need for a legislative win before November, which could change how aggressively this money gets deployed in the campaign's final stretch.