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.)