Miami Mayor Denis Suarez, who’s running for president of the United States, took a shot at his Republican counterpart in the presidential race, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
Emphasizing his own support for crypto, Suarez said about DeSantis: “You gotta go beyond just saying that the central bank digital currencies are bad. Everybody agrees on that. That’s a very easy position.”
That incident tells a lot about the role crypto could have in the upcoming presidential race, but it says even more about DeSantis, who, until recently, was the most prominent “crypto candidate” in the field.
Now the politician faces harsh competition from other, vocally pro-crypto candidates, and his chances to become president or even win the Republican primaries are rapidly declining.
How DeSantis became a crypto darling
The Florida governor has been vocally supporting crypto since as early as 2021, when he proposed to allow businesses to pay state fees with cryptocurrencies in the 2022–2023 budgetary year.
Standing at a podium bearing the phrase “Big Brother’s Digital Dollar,” the politician urged Florida lawmakers and their “like-minded” counterparts to preventively prohibit the introduction of the digital dollar in their states. A CBDC is all about surveilling Americans and controlling their behavior, DeSantis added.
Later, he continued to criticize the CBDC and its potential issuer, the United States Federal Reserve, on Twitter (now called X).
In May, DeSantis signed a bill restricting the use of CBDCs, including foreign ones, in the state. Once again, he emphasized the difference between CBDCs and private digital currencies: “I think they want to crowd out and eliminate other types of digital assets like cryptocurrency because they can’t control that, so they don’t like that.”
Later, DeSantis promised to lobby for the same prohibition if he becomes the president of the United States.
DeSantis vowed not only to ban CBDCs forever but to end President Joe Biden’s “war on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency” should he succeed him in the White House. However, he didn’t refer to any specific policies of the Biden administration, preferring to concentrate his attention on the Federal Reserve.
Back in May, when the list of candidates for the presidency was much shorter, DeSantis seemed to many to be the logical choice for Republicans in general and the crypto community in particular.
DeSantis gained fame as a fighter against sanctuary cities, LGBTQ+ rights, gun control and the Affordable Care Act. But for a while, those could have been seen at least as a realistic compromise, signifying the partisan divide over crypto.
However, in the last few months, everything has changed.
Presidential candidacy unravels
Epithets about DeSantis, like “circling the drain” and “falling apart,” started to appear in the media in the middle of July. By the end of last month, his campaign had to cut almost a third of its staff to stay afloat.
DeSantis still remains the second Republican candidate after former President Donald Trump, according to polls. However, if at the beginning of July he was a clear second choice for 35% of Republican voters, by the middle of August, this rating plummeted to 23%.
The pundits agree DeSantis failed at his strategy of becoming a “Trump-not-Trump” candidate, engaging aggressively in the same cultural wars but with a promise of electability in the midst of criminal investigations of the former president’s alleged behavior.
As it soon became clear, DeSantis failed to attract the loyal base of Trump’s conservative voters, who still believe in their candidate, while at the same time scaring away more moderate Republicans, who hope to cast their votes for someone not obsessed with a struggle for schools’ curricula.
DeSantis engaged in a feud with Trump, claiming that the latter failed to fulfill his presidential promises during his term, even with regard to building his notorious wall with Mexico. In response, Trump called his fellow Republican “Rondesanctimonious” and advised him to get a “personality transplant.”
“When he tries to be as visceral as Trump, he just comes off as weird,” sums up David Bateman, a political scientist at Cornell.
Alternative candidates
The good news is that even if DeSantis fails, he’s not the only pro-crypto candidate.
The Democrats have Robert Kennedy Jr., who publicly confessed to buying 2 BTC for each of his children. He also announced that he would begin accepting campaign donations in Bitcoin and make the currency exempt from capital gains taxes if elected president.
Kennedy even promised to back the U.S. dollar with Bitcoin in the event of his victory. But for all that, in late July, just 9% of Democrats had a favorable opinion of Kennedy, with words like “crazy,” “dangerous,” “insane,” “nutjob,” “conspiracy” and “crackpot” among the most popular to describe the candidate.
Perhaps still far from the obvious favorite, the youngest-ever Republican presidential candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, managed to raise the level of favorable opinions about him from 16% in April to 27.2% in August and stands third in the polls after Trump and DeSantis.
The candidate, called “very promising” by entrepreneur Elon Musk, pushed for a stronger crypto industry in the U.S. and also accepts BTC for campaign donations, even offering nonfungible tokens (NFTs) to qualifying donors.
One obvious problem is that Ramaswamy demonstrates no less eccentricity than Kennedy, comparing Massachusetts Representative Ayanna Pressley to the Ku Klux Klan’s grand wizard (Pressley is Black) and rapping Eminem’s songs at events. The rapper has since asked Ramaswamy to stop.
“Speaking about Governor DeSantis, I think it will be surprising to some that, by some polling, he may have been the winner or a winner of a recent debate,” Martin Dobelle, co-founder and CEO of Engage — a platform for crypto donations to political campaigns — told Cointelegraph.
Indeed, according to polls conducted in the aftermath of the Republican candidates’ first debate, 29% of debate viewers considered DeSantis to be the best performer of the evening.
However, 26% of respondents named Ramaswamy as the champion of the debate. It should be noted that Donald Trump was absent from the debate.
Nevertheless, Dobelle doesn’t think that one person should be considered a “crypto candidate,” nor should a single party be named the pro-crypto party.
“Dragging financial technology into this polarized political climate is not going to be a constructive strategy,” he said. “Rather than putting its chips behind one candidate, party or another, crypto should be building bridges and meeting people where they are in terms of where and how to start conversations about policy.”
Dave Weisberger, CEO of algorithmic trading platform CoinRoutes, believes that it’s not just candidates who can influence crypto regulation. He told Cointelegraph, “Even with the current Biden administration’s open hostility towards digital assets, they might change policy if the pollsters tell them to do so.”
Perhaps the major intrigue that remains is Donald Trump’s crypto card for 2024. A vocal Bitcoin critic during his presidential term, the politician was recently revealed to possess over $2.8 million in an Ethereum wallet, in addition to over $4.8 million from licensing fees tied to NFT collections using his image.
Former deputy prime minister Sir Oliver Dowden has become the most senior ally of Rishi Sunak to be interviewed in the official investigation into betting on the date of the general election, Sky News understands.
A source close to Sir Oliver said the former senior cabinet minister is not and was never under investigation himself.
It is understood Sir Oliver spoke to the police to assist with their inquiries as part of their investigation into others. This is said to have taken place in early summertime and the officers involved were part of the Gambling Commission.
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The inquiry – launched in June – is set to continue for another three to six months.
Ironically, the Gambling Commission’s head office, on the fourth floor of Victoria Square House, Victoria Square, Birmingham, is just a half-mile, 10-minute walk from the ICC, where the Tory conference is taking place.
Sir Oliver was knighted and Mr Booth-Smith was awarded a peerage in the former prime minister’s dissolution honours, announced less than an hour before the polls closed on 4 July.
The commission is investigating whether bets were placed on a July election by people with inside knowledge – in breach of gambling rules – in the days leading up to Mr Sunak’s shock announcement of the election date on 22 May.
A source told Sky News: “The general election betting investigation is still ongoing. Hundreds of documents have been seized by the Gambling Commission from CCHQ.
“The Gambling Commission has also employed more ex-police as investigators to take the case forward. It’s expected the case will continue for three to six months.”
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2:46
Gambling scandal: Another bruise for the Tories?
Asked if Mr Sunak has been interviewed, the source said: “I don’t believe so. Numerous people have been interviewed, in and out of CCHQ.
“Gambling Commission investigators have made numerous visits to CCHQ. Oliver Dowden was interviewed.”
What is the election betting scandal?
The election date betting scandal began in June when Craig Williams, formerly MP for Montgomeryshire and Mr Sunak’s parliamentary private secretary, admitted he was being investigated by the Gambling Commission.
Mr Williams had placed a £100 bet on a July election at Ladbrokes in his constituency just days before Mr Sunak announced on 22 May that the election would be held on 4 July. Based on odds at the time, he would have won £500.
“I put a flutter on the General Election some weeks ago,” he said in a post on X on 13 June. “This has resulted in some routine inquiries and I confirm I will fully co-operate with these.
“I don’t want it to be a distraction from the campaign. I should have thought through how it looks.”
Mr Williams, who admitted he had made a “huge error”, was dropped by the Tories as their candidate in the new seat of Montgomeryshire and Glyndwr but remained on the ballot paper, but was defeated, coming third behind Labour and Reform UK.
As the Gambling Commission proceeded, Tony Lee, the party’s director of campaigns, and his wife Laura Saunders, who was Tory candidate for Bristol North West, were placed under investigation.
In a statement on the day news of the investigation was first reported, Saunders said she would be “cooperating with the Gambling Commission”, while Lee took a leave of absence from his role.
Then Nick Mason, the party’s chief data officer, became the fourth Conservative candidate or official to be investigated. He took a leave of absence and denied any wrongdoing.
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In a bizarre twist, a Labour candidate in the election, Kevin Craig, was then suspended by his party after betting against himself and the Gambling Commission launched an investigation into him.
Mr Craig, candidate in Central Suffolk and North Ipswich, posted on X that he had “enjoyed the odd bet for fun” throughout his life.
“A few weeks ago when I thought I would never win this seat I put a bet on the Tories to win here with the intention of giving any winnings to local charities,” he said.
“While I did not place this bet with any prior knowledge of the outcome, this was a huge mistake, for which I apologise unreservedly.”
Then on 27 June Sky News revealed that Mr Booth-Smith, then Mr Sunak’s most senior adviser in Downing Street, had been interviewed by senior Gambling Commission officials and questioned about who knew about the timing of the election.
Sources emphasised, however, that Mr Booth-Smith was not a suspect and was interviewed as a witness and was “asked for help”.
Sky News has approached Mr Dowden and the Conservative Party for comment.
Kemi Badenoch has said her remarks about maternity pay have been “misrepresented”, as she called for an “honest campaign” for the Tory leadership.
The first day of the Conservative Party conference saw a row erupt over comments made by the shadow housing secretary, where she appeared to call the current level of the benefit “excessive”.
But speaking to Sky News on Sunday evening, Ms Badenoch said she believed maternity pay was “a good thing”, adding: “I don’t think it is excessive.”
Instead, she claimed there was “some mischief being made on social media trying to misrepresent me” amid the race to take over from Rishi Sunak.
“I want to talk about serious things, hard truths during this campaign,” said the leadership hopeful. “I want to talk about my previous job as business secretary, what businesses told me [about] excessive business regulation.
“Maternity pay isn’t one of those, but other things are. That is how we are going to get back on track.”
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She added: “It is really important that this leadership contest is one where we have honesty and truth and not misrepresentation of remarks.
“I am not somebody who is fazed by that [but] the members of our party want to see an honest campaign, and that’s what I am fighting for.”
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Ms Badenoch first made her remarks about maternity pay on Times Radio, saying the benefit was a “function of tax”.
“Tax comes from people who are working, we’re taking from one group of people and giving to another,” she added. “This, in my view, is excessive.”
Challenged on saying maternity pay is “excessive”, the former minister said: “I think it’s gone too far, too far the other way, in terms of general business regulation, we need to allow businesses, especially small businesses, to make more of their own decisions.
“The exact amount of maternity pay, in my view, is neither here nor there. We need to make sure that we are creating an environment where people can work and people can have more freedom to make their individual decisions.”
After the interview, one of her rivals in the Tory leadership contest, Robert Jenrick, told a fringe event at the conference he disagreed with her, and as a father of three daughters, he “wants to see them get the support they need”.
The former immigration minister said maternity pay in the UK was already “among the lowest in the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development)”, before adding: “We should firmly be on the side of… working mums trying to get on… why would we want to make it harder on them?”
However, when asked by reporters if he would like maternity pay to rise, he said he would like it to stay “at the level where it is” – just not lowered further.