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Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) traveled to Pennsylvania for a town hall on Saturday to offer Democrats advice on how to build a bigger tent — and perhaps to drum up support for a potential 2028 presidential bid.
When an attendee asked Gallego about a fundraiser he held with Marc Andreessen, a billionaire crypto investor and close ally of Donald Trump, the freshman senator stayed on message — framing it as an example of how Democrats should bring more people in the tent. (The fundraiser was first reported by Rolling Stone.)
“My general view of how to win elections is you have to get a lot of votes, and that means we’re going to have to have alliances with people that we may not agree with 100 percent of the time,” said Gallego, stating that “Marc Andreessen runs the largest venture capital firm in Arizona. We want to bring as many jobs as possible.”
Gallego said he doesn’t agree with Andreessen on every issue, pointing to the existence of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which the VC exec accused of “terrorizing financial institutions” after it fined a payday lending company backed by his firm.
But Gallego added, “My perspective [is] what happened last election is that we got so pure and we kept so pure that we started kicking you out of the tent. It ends up there aren’t enough people in the tent to win elections.”
Gallego held a $5,000-per-ticket fundraising retreat for his leadership PAC in March, with Andreessen listed as a featured guest speaker. Political blogger Matt Yglesias was also slated to speak at the event, held at the luxury resort L’Auberge de Sedona.
The event took place months after Gallego was made the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee’s new subcommittee on “digital assets,” created to oversee cryptocurrencies.
Andreessen, who advised Trump as he assembled his outwardly pro-crypto administration, and his firm — Andreessen Horowitz — have invested in crypto for years. The firm lobbies extensively on crypto issues.
Andreessen, the firm, and co-founder Ben Horowitz donated more than $100 million last election cycle to a pro-crypto Super PAC, Fairshake, and its subsidiary Protect Progress. The latter Super PAC spent $10 million boosting Gallego’s 2024 Senate campaign.
Andreessen Horowitz has been lobbying on legislation called the GENIUS Act, which would create a new, weak regulatory framework for so-called stablecoins, or crypto assets pegged to actual currencies, like the U.S. dollar. Experts say the legislation would effectively allow Big Tech firms like Amazon, Meta, or X to create their own digital currencies. (Andreessen Horowitz has invested in X, formerly known as Twitter.)
The GENIUS Act has become more controversial due to the last development in the Trump family’s wildly corrupt crypto dealings. Reuters recently reported that a state-backed fund in the United Arab Emirates is making a $2 billion investment using a stablecoin from the Trump family’s crypto exchange.
Gallego is one of several crypto-friendly Democrats who helped stop the GENIUS Act from advancing in the Senate last week. According to reporting from the American Prospect, it’s widely expected these Democrats will ultimately support the legislation.
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