A “Corporate Money Death Star” Is Looming Over the 2024 Election. We’re About to See If It Wins.

About a week before the 2022 midterms, FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange founded by billionaire wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried, began to collapse. The day before ballots were cast, the company announced it was seeking a bailout. A month later, Bankman-Fried had been arrested on a smattering of civil and criminal charges, including a number of campaign finance violations. Not long after that he was sentenced to 25 years behind bars.

The fallout for electoral politics was immediate. In the months prior to FTX’s implosion, Bankman-Fried had made himself the face of a crypto campaign-finance machine of spectacular might. For nearly the entire 2022 election cycle, he was the second largest Democratic donor after George Soros, putting up nearly $40 million to shape House and Senate races (a late spending surge by Michael Bloomberg knocked SBF to third). And that doesn’t count his millions in dark money donations, or those made by his close associates.

The goals were lofty: Bankman-Fried dressed up the reason for his political giving in aspirational language and philosophical commitments. He talked of pandemic preparedness, of climate change mitigation, and broad principles for an advanced vision for society.
He claimed to not even know what his preferred candidates’ positions on crypto regulation were. He was in it for the good of the country.

But the conviction of SBF and the death of FTX—and the subsequent clawing back of donations powered by stolen funds—sobered up a political class entranced by tales of “effective altruism.” Gone was the coziness between crypto and House super PACs. No one wanted to have to return ill-begotten cash again. It seemed that the fall of Bankman-Fried signaled the death of one of the biggest political spending machines in American history—a nail in the coffin for the respectability of the crypto lobby.

And yet, less than two years later, it is back with a vengeance. Faceless, but more menacing and powerful than ever, with four times the money, crypto is wreaking havoc on the 2024 election cycle. It’s haunting one Ohio senator in particular, threatening to throw majority control of the all-important chamber to Republicans.

This time, there’s no grand political theorizing. No time to waste on utopian futures or societal........

© Slate

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