(DCNF)—The crypto industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars during the midterm election cycle, just for anti-crypto Democrats to become more ascendant.
Anti-crypto lawmakers will likely take key positions of power in a Democratic Congress next year, although the industry claims it helped elect more pro-crypto lawmakers than ever. Americans’ hatred towards artificial intelligence (AI) and data centers led to the wipeout and that a Democratic majority in Congress will focus more on oversight of the crypto industry’s relationship with President Donald Trump than on scrutinizing the industry itself, experts say.
The industry spent $200 million during the midterm elections, with more than $60 million spent unsuccessfully to defeat former Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, a staunch anti-crypto lawmaker, according to Reuters.
“The Sherrod Brown race was a huge whiff,” Ron Hammond, head of policy at crypto trading firm Wintermute, and a former Blockchain Association and Ripple government relations director, told the Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview.
Brown spent years as the Senate Banking Committee chairman, often blocking the advancement of crypto bills passed by the House, and instead focused on consumer protection-related issues, per Coindesk. After his ouster in 2024, Congress passed the GENIUS Act in 2025, a bill regulating stablecoins, or digitized dollars, and nearly passed legislation establishing how to regulate much of the crypto industry bill, per the outlet.
The crypto industry in 2024 spent roughly $40 million to unseat Brown and elect Ohio Republican Bernie Moreno, a pro-crypto candidate, according to Bloomberg.
Brown’s return to Congress would likely hinder the future advancement of crypto bills.
Arizona Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego said crypto groups “better go talk to Sherrod Brown first” before trying to pass another crypto bill, the Washington Sun reported.
JD’s manually curated links for God-fearing MAGA patriots
Despite the loss in that prominent race, he argued that Americans were focused on more salient issues such as AI and data centers.
“You could probably say AI data centers definitely had a lot more of an impact on the elections, as did the cost of living and all that stuff. It wasn’t a crypto reckoning or anything to that effect. Crypto, as many folks know, kind of went to the sideline in terms of issues,” Hammond explained.
Stand With Crypto, a crypto advocacy organization launched with the help of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, said a majority of its endorsed candidates won their elections in a statement on Wednesday, per a press release. Out of the races currently called, there are 50 pro-crypto senators, 33 anti-crypto senators, 236 pro-crypto House lawmakers, and 106 anti-crypto lawmakers in Congress’s lower chamber, Stand With Crypto said on its website.
“These midterm election results are a testament to these voters and to the time, energy, and decisions they contributed towards protecting a better financial system for us all,” Mason Lynaugh, the executive director of Stand With Crypto, said in a statement.
“Some crypto champions won and some lost, but we have more pro-crypto candidates elected to Congress than we’ve ever seen in a new member class before. That’s progress,” Kara Calvert, the vice president of policy for Coinbase, wrote on Wednesday.
Fairshake, a super PAC backed by cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, Ripple and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, backed 32 House candidates: 19 Republicans and 13 Democrats, per Reuters. Twenty-nine of these 34 candidates have won so far and of the six House candidates that it spent more than $1 million, it won three.
“Newly elected and current members will have a choice: protect consumers and American jobs or fight progress,” Geoff Vetter, a spokesperson for Fairshake, told the outlet.
The crypto super PAC claimed victory in defeating Nebraska independent Senate candidate Dan Osborn’s bid to oust Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts, a pro-crypto lawmaker that voted to advance the Clarity Act, which ultimately did not pass through the Senate this Congress, Reuters noted.
“As the biggest spender in the Nebraska Senate race, we’re proud to have helped Sen. Ricketts weather the waves of a hard-fought cycle,” Vetter said.
Fairshake did not respond to a DCNF comment request.
Crypto PACs spent $2 million backing House Financial Services digital asset subcommittee chairman Bryan Steil, all for Wisconsin Democratic candidate Mitchell Berman to unseat him, per Fortune. The digital asset industry spent $1.4 million in favor of Texas Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton, who lost to Democratic candidate James Talarico, per the outlet.
However, Talarico may be a pro-crypto senator despite the industry’s opposition to him, Hammond argued.
Talarico, as a state representative in June 2025, voted for S.B. 121, a bill that would establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve for the state of Texas, which Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law in June, per LegiScan.
Talarico’s campaign did not respond to a DCNF comment request.
Industry officials have established a strong foothold in Washington, D.C., over the last few years.
“Where crypto is today compared to we were two years ago is night and day,” Stu Alderoty, chief legal officer at Ripple, told the outlet.
President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign tried to build a “crypto army,” although it appears voters may have soured on the elections since then, according to NBC News.
Sixty-three percent of American voters have a negative view of crypto, while 37% had a more favorable view of the crypto industry, according to a Coindesk poll released in April. Nearly two-thirds of likely midterm voters said they were less likely to vote for a candidate who took a lot of donations from the crypto industry, while only 13% would be more likely to vote for a crypto industry-backed candidate, per a July poll commissioned by Americans for Financial Reform, a left-leaning progressive advocacy group.
As Democratic lawmakers plan their legislative agenda, Hammond said that he believes they will focus on the industry’s relationship with the Trump administration.
He pointed to a Wall Street Journal report that alleged that then-White House crypto adviser Bo Hines helped shape a law around stablecoins, or a digital version of the dollar, while receiving millions of dollars from Tether, the largest stablecoin issuer, per Yahoo Finance.
Hines “did not receive any Tether-derived funds during that period, and had no economic relationship of any kind with Tether while serving in the White House” and did not move for a position at Tether, according to a representative from Nxum, a small consulting firm that Hines started, per the Journal. The spokesperson added that Hines recused himself from Nxum business while working at the White House and ethics rules did not require him to divest from his business.
Hammond also pointed to Trump pardoning Changpeng Zhao, the founder of the Binance cryptocurrency exchange, who reportedly pled guilty to failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering operation at his company and paid a $4.3 billion fine, Reuters reported.
Anti-crypto lawmakers are poised to take prominent positions in Congress.
Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a vehemently anti-crypto lawmaker, is poised to take over the powerful Senate Banking Committee, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Although Brown may not become a chairman, he could still become a vocal advocate in crypto-related committees such as the Senate Agriculture Committee and Senate Finance Committee, Punchbowl News reported.
California Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters this week sent a letter to Democratic colleagues in her bid to become House Financial Services chair, saying that she would push to pass “legislation to stop Trump’s crypto corruption, establish tough but fair rules of the road” and “create safeguards to protect consumers, small businesses and the financial system,” per Punchbowl News.
The Wintermute policy head said that Democrats may start carrying water for the banking industry over whether stablecoins should give customers interest for holding these digitized dollars. The GENIUS Act, which Trump signed into law in 2025, created a regulatory framework for stablecoins and the Trump administration is finalizing a rule that would give cryptocurrency exchange customers rewards for activities other than merely holding these stablecoins, according to Roll Call.
Hammond sees potential cooperation between the crypto industry and the Democratic Congress, unlike the anti-crypto Biden administration which pushed the industry to move towards Republicans and Trump.
“I think Democrats learned their lesson two years ago, like don’t go after crypto fully. But it remains to be seen if they take the bait or not,” he said.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
