Congress
AI and crypto groups were among the biggest players in this year’s primaries. Here’s how they did.
At least one in six members of the next Congress are all but certain to have made it there with the backing of the crypto industry or artificial intelligence interests.
A smattering of super PACs representing factions from those sectors spent a whopping $127 million across more than 100 primaries this year in an effort to shape the future of Congress — and won roughly 90 percent of them.
It’s a major influence play from a set of political players that went from not existing four years ago to being among the biggest spenders so far this cycle.
But behind the headline track record, the outcomes are more nuanced: Many of the groups’ victories were in effectively uncontested races in which they backed incumbents who did not face serious primary challenges.
In Republican primaries, the groups had a near-perfect track record, in large part because they usually aligned with endorsements from President Donald Trump. In Democratic contests, their records were more mixed: They racked up plenty of wins but also lost some high-profile races when they were up against each other or other moneyed groups — or when their spending itself became an issue in the race.
“Campaign finance is in such a Wild West, uncharted territory, and wealth is so obscene that they can spend this kind of money on politics,” said Cooper Teboe, a Silicon Valley-based Democratic consultant. “So I think we’re in truly deeply uncharted territory.”
The rapid growth of tech money aiming to influence politics and policymaking has created a complicated constellation of groups. Fairshake, a pro-cryptocurrency super PAC primarily funded by Coinbase, Ripple Labs and the venture capitalist firm Andreessen Horowitz, launched in the 2024 cycle and funds two other super PACs, one each supporting Democrats and Republicans.
Then came the AI super PACs this cycle, including Leading the Future, a pro-AI group funded by major industry executives including OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, which also backs both parties through two other super PACs. And Public First Action, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit whose backers include the firm Anthropic and bills itself as an AI regulation-focused counterweight to Leading the Future, helps fund two super PACs of its own.
And there are a smattering of other smaller PACs that spent in primaries too.
“Super PACs play a huge role in American politics, and not for the good,” said former Rep. Brad Carson (D-Okla.), who co-founded Public First Action last year. “The innovation that we had at Public First was rather than just complain about Leading the Future having a super PAC, we were like, ‘OK, we will regrettably fight fire with fire.’”
The eye-popping spending comes as voters and party leaders continue to grapple with the emerging technology, with battles over AI regulation and data centers front and center ahead of November’s midterm elections.
The super PACs have scaled up quickly as the industries have grown rapidly and created a new class of tech billionaires flush with cash they can spend on politics. The new spenders largely have not fallen along traditional partisan or ideological lines, but sought to boost lawmakers on both sides of the aisle that they see as aligned with their legislative interests — or oust those who have gone against their priorities.
“For our organization, we said we were going to show up and show up at scale, and we did,” said Josh Vlasto, who worked for Fairshake last cycle and now helps run Leading the Future, the network of super PACs funded by AI executives and investors that advocates for the expansion of the technology.
“We wanted to show up for candidates in primaries, particularly ones that were being attacked on issues related to AI or had a really strong position on AI,” he said.
For most of the groups, the primaries are expected to just be a warmup. Fairshake and its affiliates had just shy of $123 million in the bank at the end of July, according to the most recent campaign finance reports. Last cycle, that network of crypto groups spent $87 million across more than two dozen House and Senate races for the general election.
Among the group’s wins: A Fairshak-network PAC put $12 million behind GOP Rep. Barry Moore’s Senate campaign, seeing him through a six-way primary after Trump also endorsed him. The crypto group also helped boost Rep. Christian Menefee (D-Texas) in a member-on-member primary against Rep. Al Green, and also got its preferred candidates to replace two retiring Democrats, with Adrian Boafo winning the primary for Rep. Steny Hoyer’s seat in Maryland and Jasmine Clark set to replace the late Rep. David Scott in Georgia.
“We’re just getting started building the largest pro-crypto Congress in history,” Fairshake spokesperson Geoff Vetter said in a statement.
Most of the races where the groups spent heavily in primaries will not be competitive in the general election, meaning the candidates that made it through are all but certain to be in Congress next year. Just over half of candidates who got a boost from cryptocurrency or AI-linked super PACs in their primaries were running in open seats, while a bit over 40 percent were incumbents and a handful were challengers.
The vast majority of incumbents easily win their primaries, and those who got backing from crypto or AI groups largely also won by healthy margins, making it hard to attribute their victory to the PACs. One notable exception was Rep. Valerie Foushee (D-N.C.), who warded off a primary challenger by roughly 1 percentage point after getting $1.6 million in backing from Jobs and Democracy PAC, a Public First affiliate.
Some of the biggest losses for both the cryptocurrency and AI groups came in their highest-profile races where they spent the most — and where the fact they were spending at all also became itself a campaign issue.
In Michigan’s 13th District, Rep. Shri Thanedar, a vocal cryptocurrency proponent, lost his seat despite Fairshake’s $2 million spent in the race. In Illinois, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi lost a Democratic Senate primary despite nearly $10 million in spending from Fairshake. (His opponent, Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton, slammed him for being supported by a “MAGA-backed crypto PAC.”)
“If they’re spending against you, you are in a good position for reelection because you’re clearly where popular opinion is,” said Teboe, the Silicon Valley-based Democratic strategist.
No race attracted as much tech money and attention as New York’s 12th District, where Jobs and Democracy PAC and two smaller groups came head-to-head with Think Big, a Leading the Future affiliate. The four groups combined spent nearly $25 million, with Think Big opposing New York Assemblymember Alex Bores’ campaign, while the other three groups supported him.
Bores, who had championed the Raise Act, an AI safety and regulation bill in the state Legislature, ultimately lost to Micah Lasher — though Lasher is also an AI critic, making the result hardly a win for the industry. The race and AI-backed spending also significantly raised Bores’ profile as a critic of the industry.
“Lasher is a co-sponsor of the Raise Act and harsher on the AI sector than Alex Bores was, and by choosing to fight in New York City, and making it their mission to destroy Alex, they made him into a national hero,” said Carson, who leads Public First, the group behind Jobs and Democracy PAC.
The Manhattan congressional race also laid bare the competing goals of the dueling AI-backed super PACs. Public First focuses on advocating for AI regulation, Carson noted, arguing that it should be excluded from Blue Light News’s tally of crypto and AI spending. The group is bankrolled in part by $40 million in donations from Anthropic.
Bores described the AI industry’s political spending this cycle as a new effort to persuade public opinion that immediately fell flat with voters.
“Social media came on the scene and everyone’s like, ‘Oh, Arab Spring! It’s gonna lead to democracy! It’s gonna save the world!’” Bores said in an interview. The AI industry “started from the jump, realizing they were deeply, deeply, deeply unpopular, and the only way that their policy choices would be implemented is if they could drown out the voice of the American people with money.”
The Leading the Future affiliates spent in nearly a dozen primaries since New York, winning all of them. The groups boosted candidates including Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.), who faced a progressive primary challenger in a seat altered by redistricting, and Democrats Jeremy Moss and Dan Koh in open seats in Michigan and Massachusetts, along with Republicans such as South Carolina Sen. Darline Graham and Wyoming Rep. Harriet Hageman, who is running for Senate.
Compared to hotly contested general elections, which can attract tens of millions in spending for House races and hundreds for Senate races, primaries are relatively affordable for outside groups, said Rich Barton, a senior research fellow at Unite America, a group that advocates for reforms to the primary process. Still, the scale of the spending seen in some of the open-seat primaries this year was new.
“There’s not a precedent for the more than $10 million that we’ve seen a single entity spend in a single primary,” Barton said.
House Democrats’ top election leader has a message for states ahead of the midterms: count faster.
“We are, I think, nicely trying to encourage people to do their balloting as quickly as possible, and that means hiring additional staff so that it doesn’t call into question results,” Rep. Joe Morelle of New York, the top Democrat on the House Administration Committee, said in a Thursday interview with Blue Light News.
The advice is just one part of Morelle’s efforts to secure the midterm elections. He said Democrats have wargamed over 150 scenarios of how the Trump administration could attempt to interfere or complicate the November elections and its certification. He is encouraging states to have a “degree of urgency” when counting ballots to stave off Republican-led conspiracy theories about the reasons for delays.
Morelle said he is leaning on states to staff up on election officials to facilitate speedy ballot counting while emphasizing the process should still be “done properly,” “fairly” and that “we don’t want people with cast ballots not to have their ballots counted.” He is going to Los Angeles next week to deliver that message and meet with election security experts and election administrators — though he did not specify whom he is meeting with or where.
“We are trying to gently encourage people to staff up,” he said. Morelle added that if Democrats take the House majority, they’d “push for more resources for local and state administrators so they can hire additional capacity.”
Morelle has other big plans in the majority, including cracking down on dark money in politics, protecting voting rights and most notably, working on a bipartisan voter identification bill.
Asked whether he could accept some form of voter identification as part of a larger bipartisan elections package, Morelle said, “I’m personally not opposed to some form of voter ID,” adding that he has opposed multiple Republican-led proposals to tighten up identification requirements.
“I don’t know where my colleagues on the Democrat side will be, but I think voters think, ‘Okay, you show your ID for just tons of things. Is it really that much of a burden?’” he said. “And if it is, we’ll get state issued IDs or federally issued IDs to people who can’t afford it. So I do think that there’s hope for a bipartisan way forward, and I’ll be anxious to work with colleagues to do it.”
Speaker Mike Johnson on Thursday curtailed the chamber’s pre-election calendar, putting a number of priorities at risk of being delayed until the lame-duck period or axed altogether.
Johnson cited pre-midterm political pressures and a lack of action in the Senate — which is due to return Sept. 14 — as reasons for canceling the House’s final two weeks of session before November.
But that means House lawmakers have just one more work week in Washington before the elections, and a short list of priorities some members wanted to see action on are now in serious doubt:
— DATA CENTERS: One key item that could slip off the pre-midterm agenda is a measure to rein in data centers. Several vulnerable Republicans, like Rep. Rob Bresnahan, say they want to respond to voter backlash against the AI infrastructure.
Rep. Brett Guthrie’s so-called Ratepayer Protection Act was the most promising bill poised for action this month given its bipartisan approval by Energy and Commerce. He’s been pushing Johnson for a floor vote for the bill meant to curb data centers’ grid impact — but the speaker has made no commitments as the broader data center issue has divided Republicans.
— RUSSIA SANCTIONS: Legislation aimed at sanctioning Russia’s trading partners is also at risk of languishing in the House after supporters earlier this week had hoped for a vote this month. Johnson on Thursday told reporters leaders were still trying to build bipartisan consensus on the measure.
Foreign Affairs ranking member Gregory Meeks, “apparently is vehemently opposed to it, and I think the Democrat leadership is as well,” Johnson said. “This should be a bipartisan effort.”
— EPSTEIN OVERSIGHT: House Oversight members, including Chair James Comer, wanted to hold a meeting as early as this month for Attorney General Todd Blanche to be interviewed as part of the panel’s Jeffrey Epstein investigation. But yesterday Comer sought to temper expectations given the shortened calendar.
An effort by Reps. Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna to force a second House vote requiring Blanche to provide more Epstein documents could also fall by the wayside. Massie had earlier this week been bullish on getting enough signatures to force the vote before the midterms, saying he thought the transparency effort would “help anybody who’s in a purple state.”
Anything that gets punted to November joins a lengthy list of other major priorities lawmakers have lined up to deal with when they return, including the annual defense policy bill, government funding legislation, a surface transportation package, a farm bill, a renewal of government spy powers and more.
The diminished likelihood of some of these members’ priorities reaching the floor before then is a likely welcomed fate to some Republicans, who hoped to avoid what could be politically tricky votes on data centers and further scrutiny of administration officials and the Epstein files.
Democrats, meanwhile, have cast the curtailed schedule as proof of the GOP’s dysfunction.
“No farm bill. No AI regulations. No affordability agenda. No transportation bill. No water resources bill. No college sports bill. No end to this war,” Sen. Brian Schatz posted about Johnson’s schedule change. “See you right before the holidays! Great job!”
What else we’re watching:
— BATTLEGROUND REPUBLICANS WARY OF TRUMP MIDTERM VISITS: Republicans facing tough elections are wary of tying themselves too closely to President Donald Trump despite his eagerness to get on the campaign trail. Trump’s promise to be heavily involved in the final days of the midterm elections has put many Republicans in an uncomfortable spot: Stay too close to Trump and they could be dragged down by the president’s low approval rating. But run too far away and risk alienating MAGA or Trump, whose super PAC is sitting on more than $400 million they desperately need deployed to help them win key races.
— DEM ELECTION CHIEF WANTS FASTER VOTE TALLIES: Count faster. That’s the message from Rep. Joe Morelle, House Democrats’ top election leader, to states ahead of the midterms. Morelle said in an interview with Blue Light News he’s been leaning on states to staff up on election officials to facilitate speedy ballot counting, while emphasizing the process should still be “done properly.” The advice is part of his efforts to secure the midterm elections and stave off Republican-led conspiracy theories about the reasons for delays. Morelle also said Democrats have wargamed over 150 scenarios of how the Trump administration could attempt to interfere or complicate the November elections and its certification.
Andrew Howard, Meredith Lee Hill, Erin Doherty, and Riley Rogerson contributed to this report.
Congress
Casten tells Waters he won’t challenge her for Financial Services gavel — but won’t rule it out publicly
Rep. Sean Casten privately told Rep. Maxine Waters this week that he would not challenge her for the House Financial Services gavel next year, according to two people with knowledge of the exchange, batting down speculation that he will run against her if Democrats take back the House.
The revelation comes after Punchbowl News reported that Casten is weighing a bid to challenge Waters for the top spot on the Financial Services panel. Waters, 88, heard rumors this week about Casten considering a challenge and asked him Thursday afternoon if he planned to run against her, one of the people said. He indicated he would not, the person said.
Yet, Casten, 54, is not publicly denying that he is considering a bid. The Illinois Democrat said in a statement Thursday that he has “great respect for Ranking Member Waters, who has made the Financial Services Committee my home in Congress.”
“My focus is on working to ensure we take back the majority,” he said.
Casten, who currently serves as the vice ranking member of House Financial Services, has privately expressed interest in succeeding Waters as Financial Services chair, according to two people with knowledge of his thinking. But Blue Light News cannot independently confirm that he is currently considering running against Waters.
A spokesperson for Waters did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the matter.
Casten has previously said he backs Waters. In an interview on Nov. 21, 2025, he told Blue Light News: “I think she does a great job and she’s got my support as long as she wants to stay in that seat.”
“She brings the fire,” he said at the time. “I think in this moment you want people who are fighters.”
Waters would be the oldest House Financial Services chair ever — a concern for some Democrats who want fresh blood in the seat. Asked about her age last November, Casten said he didn’t have any concerns about Waters’ abilities.
“I am a firm believer that when people are visibly past their time, it’s time to sort of have some hard conversations,” he said. “That’s a mental issue, not an age issue. And I don’t have any concern that she’s mentally up for the job.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who is in line to become speaker if Democrats retake the House, has also signaled support for Waters. In a statement to Blue Light News in March, Jeffries said that Waters “has led the Financial Services Committee with vision, intellect, passion and skill.”
“It’s my expectation that such iconic leadership will continue in the 120th Congress,” he said at the time.
-
Politics2 years agoFormer ‘Squad’ members launching ‘Bowman and Bush’ YouTube show
-
Uncategorized2 years ago
Bob Good to step down as Freedom Caucus chair this week
-
Politics2 years agoFormer Kentucky AG Daniel Cameron launches Senate bid
-
The Dictatorship2 years agoLuigi Mangione acknowledges public support in first official statement since arrest
-
The Josh Fourrier Show2 years agoDOOMSDAY: Trump won, now what?
-
The Dictatorship2 years agoPete Hegseth’s tenure at the Pentagon goes from bad to worse
-
Politics2 years agoBlue Light News’s Editorial Director Ryan Hutchins speaks at Blue Light News’s 2025 Governors Summit
-
The Dictatorship12 months agoMike Johnson sums up the GOP’s arrogant position on military occupation with two words