Former President Donald Trump’s outreach to the crypto industry is working, according to a poll taken by Fairleigh Dickinson University that shows him leading Vice President Kamala Harris among crypto owners in the race for president.
According to FDU’s national poll, Trump leads Harris by 12 points among likely voters who own crypto, 50% to 38%, even though in 2021 he denounced crypto as a “scam.”
“Trump has been reaching out to the crypto community, and it seems to have paid off,” said Dan Cassino, a professor of government and politics at Fairleigh Dickinson and executive director of the poll. “It might be easy to dismiss them as insignificant, but I don’t think people realise exactly how widespread crypto ownership is.”
In the poll of registered voters, 15% said they currently or previously owned crypto, NFTs, or similar digital products; 80% said they have not owned such assets, and 4 percent were unfamiliar.
Last week, DL News reported that Trump promoted a crypto project called “The DeFiant Ones” with a post on his Truth Social platform. “For too long, the average American has been squeezed by the big banks and financial elites. It’s time we take a stand — together,” Trump wrote, though he provided few details.
And last month the former president addressed the world’s largest Bitcoin conference in Nashville, saying that if elected in November he would not sell any of the Bitcoin held by the US government, which amounts to about $14 billion, depending on market fluctuations. “This will serve, in effect, as the core of the strategic national Bitcoin stockpile,” DL News cited him as saying.
Still, Harris led the FDU poll by 12 points among those who said they didn’t own crypto, 53% to 41%.
The poll was conducted in English from August 17-20, using a list of registered voters nationwide, resulting in an overall sample of 801.
