Crypto and AI super PACs spent $250 million on the midterms. In the races where their money could actually make a difference, nearly two-thirds of it backed candidates who lost.
You wouldn’t know it from what the industries are saying. New issue: https://www.citationneeded.news/crypto-ai-lost-the-midterms/
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Fairshake is touting a 92% win rate. But this is only because it bet on 74 nearly guaranteed wins — out of the 18 competitive seats Fairshake spent in, its candidate won just 8.
About half of its $155 million in spending backed losers.
The biggest loss was crypto’s unsuccessful $64 million in spending to keep Sherrod Brown out of the Senate. Brown may now chair the Senate Agriculture Committee, which oversees the CFTC: the regulator crypto has spent years trying to put in charge of itself.
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Maybe the crypto PACs will chalk up their losses to the Democratic wave. But they made little effort to hedge against it — 3/4 of crypto’s spending backed Republicans, and most Democratic spending was in primaries.
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OpenAI- and a16z-linked Leading the Future spent $8.2M defeating “AI safety” candidate Alex Bores in NY-12, only for him to lose to a candidate with a similar platform. Backlash from AI’s intervention in that race was likely why they backed off in the general election.
On the other side was the Anthropic-linked “AI safety” Public First PAC network, which claimed a “crushing blow” to the “anti-regulation” PACs. But of the $29.2 million they spent, only about $10.9 million ended up helping winning candidates (37%).
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Despite the crypto industry’s public claims of widespread public support, their admakers clearly understand that being “pro-crypto” is not a winning message. Out of the 57 ads I tracked from crypto super PACs, only 3 mentioned crypto (obliquely).
AI-focused super PACs were more willing to mention their industry, but not in a good way. Most mentions came from “AI safety” PACs warning about the harms of AI, or from Leading the Future bashing Alex Bores for his history in the tech sector.
https://influence.citationneeded.news/2026/analysis/ads/library
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Most crypto and AI ads avoided mentioning their industries at all, instead telling voters what they thought they’d want to hear. One “AI safety” PAC network ran “remove the illegals, seal the border” ads for a Republican and “overhaul ICE” ads for a Democrat a few hours away.
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AI and crypto both declared victory, despite their objectively poor performance. Both have vowed to spend heavily in 2028, and are still hoping to intimidate lawmakers with the dominance they failed to demonstrate.
But before then, AI and crypto will both have to try to backtrack on their strong rightward turn over the past few years, lobbying a Democratic Congress. More on that pivot coming soon.
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