The cryptocurrency industry’s multimillion-dollar effort to protect Senate Republicans has expanded to an unlikely midterm battleground: deep-red Nebraska.
Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-NE), an industry ally and member of the Senate Banking Committee, has received almost $11 million in support from Fairshake, a leading crypto super PAC. The spending, which began two weeks ago as a $2.4 million ad buy, represents the latest example of crypto interests aligning with the GOP in a high-stakes battleground. The only other race where Fairshake has spent more is to help Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH) in Ohio.
Nebraska is not a top-tier state for Democrats and is generally expected to stay in GOP hands, but independent Dan Osborn is mounting a surprisingly strong challenge that has forced national Republicans to invest there.
The Senate Leadership Fund, an outside group linked to congressional leadership, announced that it would spend $8 million to protect Ricketts around the same time Fairshake began to get involved in mid-October.
In total, national Republicans have committed $15 million in Nebraska as polls show a margin-of-error race.
Fairshake, which is funded by a trio of crypto entities, has gone to great lengths to stress that it is a nonpartisan organization and backs candidates of either party, naming 32 House incumbents it was supporting financially earlier this month — 13 of whom are Democrats.
Still, Fairshake has given the distinct impression that it favors Republicans thanks to its heavy intervention in the Ohio Senate race. To date, crypto spending has reached $55 million to keep former Sen. Sherrod Brown, a crypto skeptic and one-time chairman of the Banking Committee, from mounting a successful political comeback.
That figure is the most Fairshake is spending on any race this cycle and tops the more than $40 million it spent in 2024, when Brown was ousted by Republicans after more than three decades in Congress.
The spending comes at a pivotal moment in Washington, with Democrats the odds-on favorite to recapture the House on Nov. 3 and Republicans attempting to hang on to their three-seat majority in the Senate.
Republicans successfully fended off an Osborn challenge last cycle, when Sen. Deb Fischer (R-NE) was up for reelection. But they are now navigating a significantly more challenging political environment with the war in Iran and the traditional backlash of a midterm election year.
In Ohio, Husted is among the most vulnerable Senate Republicans and trails Brown in the latest independent polling.
Fairshake’s spending on Ricketts, a former governor seeking his first full term in the Senate, reflects his crypto-friendly legislative record in Congress, including a vote for the CLARITY Act – an industry-favored piece of legislation that sets rules of the road for digital assets.
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That bill passed the House last year with the support of all Republicans and 78 Democrats, only to stall out in the Senate over ethics concerns about the Trump family’s extensive investments in cryptocurrency.
Fairshake announced an initial $30 million commitment to defeat Brown shortly after the Senate blocked the CLARITY Act in September, a step that was widely viewed as a warning shot to Democrats rejecting a version of ethics guardrails agreed to by the White House.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
