Among the youngest cohorts of voting age, there’s a running online joke that they “should’ve been” buying real estate or investing in Bitcoin decades ago, before seemingly everything exploded in value, but instead, alas, they were fetuses.
Part of me wonders if Congressman Al Green, the long-serving 78-year-old now facing 37-year-old Christian Menefee in the primary for the newly drawn historically Black 18th Congressional district, might be feeling something similar. Maybe, if he’d been a little nicer to the crypto industry from his seat on the Financial Services Committee (a position he first nabbed way back in 2005), the super PAC Fairshake—backed in large part by the controversial “techno-optimist” Marc Andreessen’s venture capital firm—wouldn’t be spending $1.5 million to get him out of Congress.
Money is one thing, but that last-minute outside offensive doesn’t fully explain a 24-point favorability gap (52 to 28 percent), advantage to Menefee, the former Harris county attorney who just a couple weeks ago won the runoff to represent the 18th after it sat vacant for nearly a year. (Menefee won under its current boundaries, not the redrawn lines for the upcoming primary.)
