A Crypto Billionaire Shattered the Primary Spending Record to Back a Candidate Who Is Getting Clobbe

With a significant lead in the Democratic primary that will likely determine who represents Oregon’s newly created Sixth District in the House, state representative Andrea Salinas, as of late Tuesday night, was headed for a comfortable victory over crypto-backed political newcomer Carrick Flynn.

The race attracted national attention because of the insane amount of money spent by a single cryptocurrency-related interest group to support Flynn—a 35-year-old who grew up in the area but hadn’t lived there in a number of years and had demonstrated little previous interest in electoral politics.

That group, the Protect Our Future PAC, spent more than $11 million to promote Flynn, flooding the district with advertisements touting his life story. Per Andrew Mayersohn of Open Secrets, that is “several times the previous record for spending by a single group in a single House primary.” According to the ads and his campaign bio, Flynn’s family struggled economically while he was growing up, but he was able to attend the University of Oregon on scholarship before earning a degree from Yale Law School and working in the non-profit sector on problems including pandemic preparedness.

The latter subject is what connected Flynn to Protect our Future, which says its purpose is addressing long-term existential threats to humanity. The PAC is predominantly funded by a 30-year-old named Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX. Bankman-Fried and Flynn are part of the “effective altruism” movement, a network of individuals who generally work at think tanks and in the financial industry and purport to empirically identify the areas in which a given donation or intervention can have the largest possible benefit. (Flynn said he does not know Sam Bankman-Fried but is friendly with his brother Gabe, who works on Sam’s philanthropic initiatives.)




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