GOP pulls ahead in crypto adoption as Trump backs
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- Pew Research Center found 22% of Republicans have invested in, traded, or used crypto versus 17% of Democrats, per its June 8 poll of 8,512 U.S. adults surveyed at the end of January.
- Republican crypto adoption rose 6 percentage points since 2021 (from 16%) while Democratic use "hasn't budged," with Morning Consult's Eli Yokley tracing the gap's emergence to mid-2023 and the 2024 election.
- Donald Trump shifted from calling himself "not a fan" of crypto in 2019 to launching $99 NFT trading cards in 2022, then the $TRUMP and $MELANIA memecoins and the World Liberty Financial venture.
- The White House has pushed to make the U.S. the "crypto capital of the world" in Trump's second term, including steps to allow crypto firms to become banks, according to Pew.
- The partisan gap peaked at 11 points in Q2 2025 — 27.9% of Republicans vs 17.3% of Democrats had bought or sold crypto in the prior 12 months — and has since narrowed to about 5 points, per Morning Consult.
- Men under 45 traded crypto at roughly 38-42% from 2022 to 2026 versus 13-16% for women under 45, a gap Yokley called "much bigger than politics" though intertwined with it, given young men's rightward ideological drift.
- The Solana Policy Institute's Colin McLaren attributed the rightward tilt to crypto's "libertarian DNA" of skepticism toward centralized power, while Public Citizen's Rick Claypool argued the industry's deregulation priorities "always leaned toward corporate-friendly policies" associated with Republicans.
Why it matters: The 11-point partisan peak in Q2 2025 shows crypto is no longer the bipartisan asset class its boosters claim — the industry's deregulation agenda now maps onto a single party's base. With 74% of traders being men and the White House actively writing crypto-friendly rules, the policy preferences of a narrow demographic are gaining outsized influence over how the U.S. regulates digital assets.
