The game of reading political outcomes is more art than science, especially at the national level. Election results turn on hundreds or thousands of policy and campaign margins. There is no one deciding issue. But some float to the top. My colleague Ruy Teixeira persuasively identifies four cultural and policy issues through which the progressive left handed a victory to Donald Trump, for example. Behind the billowy skirts of that caveat, I’ll float an electoral margin that I think might be salient. The election went as it did because of Democrats’ backhanded attitude toward crypto.

The story begins like this (I haven’t the foggiest about the truth): In exchange for dropping out of the presidential race in March 2020 or endorsing Joe Biden a month later, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) got to pick who would fill top slots at the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She at least really liked Gary Gensler and Rohit Chopra as heads of these two agencies. I’ve noted before that Biden abandoned his centrist instincts in giving authority over many government agencies to left-wing ideologues.

Over the years that followed, Gensler and Warren together made enemies of the cryptocurrency industry and community, catalyzing partisanship in crypto where before there had been mostly leanings—and, really, those leanings had been toward libertarianism, not the Republican Party.

It should be no surprise that an industry and community dedicated to new forms of money would have some. And they began using it a great deal more in politics. Fairshake is the largest crypto-aligned super PAC. It raised over $200 million and spent $170 million in the 2024 election cycle. Trump saw opportunity. He attended one of the large crypto conferences, lavishing promises on a wowed audience. And he accepted crypto campaign donations.

The Harris campaign gave it a try, signaling a softer stance toward crypto than the Biden administration’s, Warren’s, and Gensler’s. But it was too little too late. The crypto community was all in for Trump.

People already inclined toward a Trumpian advocacy style became more vociferous. Their collective gamble on Trump—the subject of sound warnings by CoinDesk’s Ben Schiller the day before the election—paid off. The immediate actual payoff was a new high price above $75,000 for the flagship crypto, bitcoin, in the 24 hours after the election. It is no stretch to imagine a friendlier crypto policy environment for the next four years.

The story is not just the presidential election. Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) was on the Warren team of crypto skeptics. Crypto support for his opponent, cryptophile Bernie Moreno, helped oust Brown, which is part of what has delivered the Senate to Republicans.

Happily, and smartly, the professionals in crypto are not all about Republicans. Fairshake spending in Nevada’s Fourth District went to support a Democrat, incumbent Representative Steven Horsford, who has been friendly to crypto.

“Not your keys, not your coins” is probably the most important aphorism in crypto. Another one is “The best time to get into crypto is yesterday. The second-best time is today.”

My sincere hope is for the losing side in the recent election to do some strengthening introspection. We need a good, competitive politics in this time, rent as it is by the new media environment and falling trust in institutions. Along with Teixeira’s advice on broader political and cultural issues, Democrats might bring a full stop to the anti-crypto work and agitation in their ranks.

The blockchain data protocol creates a capacity for nongovernmental, noncorporate, community administration at a global scale. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies apply that technology in money, payments, and financial services.

Given the style of many in the crypto community, now reinforced by the community’s allegiance to Trump, I understand the mistake. But true policy professionals among Democrats and the left should be able to see that blockchain and the new forms of money and finance it enables are good.

Crypto threatens an entrenched, oligopolistic industry in which literal fortunes go to the wealthy and well-connected. It is deeply ironic that in leading her party against crypto, Warren has worked to preserve the interests of titans in money and finance.

That brings us to another aphorism: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” It might take some figurative nose-holding at first to get together with crypto’s stylistic unwashed. But that’s how the unity between good policy and good politics can be found. Supporting crypto and guiding it toward better is a way of improving one’s electoral prospects.

Learn more: Stablecoins Can Defend the Dollar’s Global Status | Beyond Bitcoin (with Yuval Rooz) | Will Terrorism Have Us Do More of the World’s Least Effective Policy? | Can There Be Digital Currency Law Enforcement Without Mass Surveillance?