WASHINGTON — Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) survived more than $1 million in spending against him by the cryptocurrency industry in his Democratic primary earlier this month. Green said he now feels “liberated.”

“Today, I am going to embrace the topic that has caused a good deal of consternation in this Congress, a topic that many people would say it would be injudicious to embrace, because of the consequences,” Green said in a speech on the House floor Thursday. “Why is the crypto industry spending mega millions of dollars to control Congress?”

Most Democrats have spent the months since the 2024 election aiming to avoid angering the crypto industry, especially after it made an example out of former Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) by spending millions of dollars on ads attacking them before they lost their races. But recent Democratic primaries may have sown the seeds of an eventual Democratic backlash.

Green surprisingly managed to advance to his runoff against freshman Rep. Christian Menefee despite the crypto intervention. And crypto’s heavy spending in a pair of races in Illinois not only failed to defeat candidates there, it also angered the state’s elected officials.

“What they’re doing in trying to affect and buy an election by coming in and spending $10 million at the last minute — all it did was turn voters against them,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) told HuffPost. “All it did was make me think twice about what they’re willing to do to further the industry and reduce the guardrails around them. And so if anything, they hurt their cause with what they did in Chicago, in Illinois.”

Molly White, a writer and researcher who runs a website tracking crypto campaign spending, said there was only limited grumbling about crypto in 2024, the first campaign cycle in which the industry really flexed its political muscle.

“This season, we’re seeing a lot more really explicit condemnation of the super PAC spending from crypto as well as from AI,” White said, pointing to statements from Democratic candidates Juliana Stratton and La Shawn Ford in Illinois. “I think it’s probably the beginning of a trend, and one that might be resonating with voters, because we saw a fairly strong rejection of the crypto industry’s favorite candidates in Illinois, with limited exceptions.”

There, the major crypto-funded super PAC, Fairshake, spent $10 million attacking Stratton, the state’s lieutenant governor, in the Democratic Senate primary, angry at state-level legislation regulating the industry. It also spent $2.5 million attacking Ford, a state senator, running for Congress. Both candidates won anyway. (The group did successfully defeat state Sen. Robert Peters in his House race.)

Fairshake declined to comment for this story.

The relative success of Ford and Stratton has some Democrats reconsidering their approach to an industry they had been afraid to actively antagonize after Porter’s defeat in 2024.

Porter, an acolyte of crypto-industry enemy Sen. Elizabeth Warren, is now running for governor. Last summer, she met with and took a $39,200 donation from the co-founder of the crypto firm Ripple. The executive later told Politico he found Porter’s “willingness to learn and engage refreshing.”

Many progressives were making similar calculations as they headed into an election season where the artificial intelligence industry and AIPAC are similarly threatening to spend millions of dollars on television ads bashing their enemies.

“You can only take so many incoming attacks, and sometimes you need to be smart about picking your enemies,” said one progressive campaign strategist who has advised his clients to avoid angering the industry and requested anonymity to speak frankly about strategy. “Say what you will about the crypto industry, they have not been helping to run cover for a genocide for the past three years.”

The strategist pointedly noted most candidates also can’t count on financial support to respond to crypto ads the way Stratton could — Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker gave $5 million to a super PAC backing her.

There has also been some confusion about how the crypto industry is picking its targets. Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, a Democrat who won on Tuesday and is now on a glide path to Congress, had an “A” grade on Stand With Crypto’s website, purportedly based on his answers to their questionnaire. But the Warren-endorsed progressive said he would not be an ally to the industry in Congress.

“I view financial regulation with both traditional financial institutions and with these new, dangerous cryptocurrencies as critical to the nation’s well-being,” he said in an interview with HuffPost before the election. “I can’t speak to their grading process, but I can say they’re not going to have a friend should I be elected.”

The spending comes even as Bitcoin and other “digital asset” values have tanked in recent months, collectively falling from more than $4 trillion last fall to just over $2 trillion.

And for all the industry’s success in creating and picking winners in the 2024 election cycle, they have not been overly successful in moving legislation.

Congress passed a bill essentially giving the government’s blessing to stablecoins, a type of crypto token pegged to the value of the dollar, but a more ambitious bill, granting the industry the lenient regulation of its dreams, has stalled. Republicans are waiting for banks and crypto firms to resolve their differences over a proposal to allow stablecoins to pay interest-like yields.

Democrats, meanwhile, have kept quiet about what’s known as the “market structure” legislation. It seems unlikely that as many Senate Democrats would be willing to vote for the bigger bill as voted for the stablecoin bill, which was dogged by complaints of President Donald Trump’s brazen use of digital assets to enrich his family — a corrupt spectacle that’s only become more obvious.

In an interview with HuffPost, Green said he was proud to have received an “F” rating from the Stand With Crypto website, which, before the election, had counted against him his votes against crypto-friendly legislation and skeptical comments he’d made during House Financial Services Committee hearings.

“This is one F that I’m going to talk about for the rest of my life, because I think that what I’ve been doing is appropriate,” Green said. “But apparently, the crypto industry doesn’t want any regulation at all, or if they have some, as little as possible, or regulation that they believe to be appropriate, without input from people like me in Congress.”

Green said he’d heard from a source that his opponent, Menefee, had a victory party planned for the night of the Texas primary earlier this month. Now the winner will have to wait for a runoff election in May.

Menefee said he doesn’t own crypto and didn’t solicit campaign help from the industry. He said he supports sensible regulations and rooting out scams, and suggested the blockchain technology underlying crypto tokens could have useful real-world applications, such as for preserving the accuracy of mortgage deeds.

“I’m committed to having a thoughtful, substantive approach on technology that we know isn’t going anywhere. We can’t bury our head in the sand. People are using it. Young people are using it at a super high rate,” Menefee told HuffPost.

The runoff is less a referendum on crypto than a question of whether it’s time to “pass the torch” to a younger generation, Menefee said. (Green is 79 and Menefee is 37.)

As for Green’s claim he’d scheduled a victory party on primary night, Menefee said his campaign had the same sort of watch party that every campaign has.

“He’s been in Congress for 20 years, and he came in second place,” Menefee said. “If the congressman was so ironclad in our communities, if he had been doing the work, if he had been standing up to Donald Trump, if he had been providing for his communities, if he had been making them better, he would not have come in second place.”

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