What happened
TD Cowen's Washington research team, led by Jaret Seiberg, told clients Tuesday that the November 3 midterms will decide whether the CLARITY Act moves in the next Congress or sits on the shelf for another year. The note, flagged by Bitcoin Magazine's Micah Zimmerman, argues that a Democratic sweep of both chambers would stall the market-structure bill even though regulators at the SEC and CFTC keep advancing rules that favor the crypto sector.
The CLARITY Act, formally the Clarity for Payment Stablecoins Act's sibling in the market-structure track, splits token oversight between the SEC and CFTC and is the industry's top legislative priority after the GENIUS stablecoin law cleared earlier this year. Cowen's call is a sell-side read, not a regulator statement, and it carries the usual caveats about late polls and turnout.
Why it matters
This is the first federal election cycle where crypto money is a declared variable rather than a sideshow. Fairshake and its affiliated PACs spent more than $160 million in the 2024 cycle backing candidates aligned with the industry's regulatory agenda, and the sector has leaned on that spending to argue it now has durable bipartisan support. Cowen's note cuts against that story.
If Democrats retake the House and hold the Senate, the committee gavels flip, and the CLARITY framework loses its sponsors in the chairs that matter. Regulators can keep writing rules. They can't write a statute.
Without CLARITY, token issuers and exchanges stay inside a case-by-case enforcement regime that the industry has spent two years and nine figures trying to escape.