SAN FRANCISCO — David Plouffe, the veteran Democratic strategist who in recent years has worked extensively in tech, is joining the global advisory council of Coinbase.
Plouffe, who recently helped guide Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign and was a top aide to Barack Obama, is the latest political heavy-hitter to join the advisory body, telling POLITICO he’ll bring his skills as a storyteller to an industry whose regulatory struggles have turned into a fight for credibility and stability.
Among Plouffe’s charges will be outreach to tech-savvy voters who flocked to Democrats during the Obama era, but have shifted to the right in recent years. It’s another move meant to reinforce the bipartisan credentials of the largest U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange as it pushes for broader buy-in after Republicans and President Donald Trump opened their arms to the industry and many of its policy goals.
“A lot of the debate is ‘are you pro-crypto or anti-crypto, pro-ride sharing or not, pro-home-sharing or not,’” Plouffe said in an interview, referencing the emerging industries that have grown around companies like Uber and Airbnb. “And I think this next stage is really deepening the benefits, whether that’s the unbanked, whether that’s security, whether that’s opening up new forms of commerce.”
Plouffe arrives a few months after the advisory council added former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — a Democrat turned independent — and Chris LaCivita, who served as Trump’s co-campaign manager in 2024. Others on the board include the Democratic pollster John Anzalone; former Democratic Reps. Tim Ryan of Ohio and Stephanie Murphy of Florida; former Republican Sen. Pat Toomey; as well as longtime Republican strategist and lobbyist David Urban, among others.
Plouffe and LaCivita are appearing on a panel this morning with Faryar Shirzad, Coinbase’s chief policy officer at the exchange’s third annual State of Crypto Summit in Manhattan.
Plouffe has worked in a number of prominent tech roles before, including at Uber, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and rival crypto exchange Binance in a similar advisory post. He was a top adviser to Obama’s first campaign and then served in the White House. He joined Harris’ unsuccessful bid last fall, blending with a team of Harris loyalists and leftover aides and advisers to former President Joe Biden.
Plouffe joins the exchange’s council during a crucial week for the crypto industry in Washington, where both the Senate and the House advanced key pieces of legislation.
The Senate could vote as soon as Monday on a bill that would create a new regulatory structure for stablecoins, which are tied to real-world assets, and is seen as an important step toward legitimizing crypto.
Two committees in the House approved another bill that would lay down the first U.S. regulatory framework for crypto assets — but not without exposing deep Democratic divisions over how to police a sector that Trump has so blatantly embraced and profited off of through his family ventures.
Plouffe conceded that “there were elements of the Biden administration clearly not very friendly to the industry” and he has since seen remarkable progress in Democrats’ attitude toward crypto.
The digital asset industry found itself in the crosshairs of Biden’s regulators after a series of high-profile scandals. Former SEC Chair Gary Gensler wielded the agency’s enforcement powers to file lawsuits and actions against companies like Coinbase, which it dropped after Trump came into power.
“In some of the votes in the Senate, in the House, and some of the comments made from people who might end up being presidential candidates in ‘28, I think there’s an understanding,” Plouffe told POLITICO.
They may have learned from last campaign cycle, when Coinbase’s influence operation quietly thrust the once-niche digital asset world into the heart of the 2024 elections. It outspent every other business in the sector on lobbying, poured millions into the industry’s leading super PAC and helped launch a grassroots arm.
Crypto has made a concerted push to keep a bipartisan reputation, though. The super PAC, Fairshake, also heavily backed the races of friendly Democrats like Sens. Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan.
Industry lobbyists have worried that the Trump family’s fast-growing interests in crypto could distract from getting the legislation it wants from Capitol Hill and undermine the president’s own desire to make the U.S. “the crypto capital of the world.”
“We don’t try to solve for one particular political circumstance or another,” Shirzad told POLITICO. “That’s been our model for the last two and a half years that we did our political efforts. And so far it’s, I think, paid off for us.”
