The Big Break by Ben Terris

Author:Ben Terris [TERRIS, BEN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2023-06-06T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 20

Look at This Coalition

Spring 2022

In early May, Leah Hunt-Hendrix invited me to her home and told me that she and the Bankman-Frieds had come to a sort of detente.

The new boyfriend, Marvin, had been incredibly helpful on this, Leah explained. Marvin was a big shot in the crypto world, so when he had called folks at a crypto-aligned super PAC (one to which Sam Bankman-Fried had donated $2 million), they were willing to listen to what he had to say. They had almost seemed starstruck to hear from him, Marvin would tell me later, and asked if he would be willing to advise them. He said he would and that his first advice was not to spend against one of Leah’s preferred candidates—Maxwell Alejandro Frost, a twenty-five-year-old Afro-Latino activist, musician, and former Bernie staffer from Florida who stood a good chance of becoming the first member of Gen Z elected to Congress.

“I told them that he was good on crypto and that he was going to win,” Marvin told me. “And so they backed off.” Meanwhile, Leah helped create a crypto advisory council for Frost that included herself and Sean McElwee (who said he had encouraged Gabe Bankman-Fried and his organization Guarding Against Pandemics to endorse Frost) and a balanced slate of other invitees—Ethereum evangelists and bitcoin buzzkills alike. But just as Leah was explaining to me about how excited she was about Frost as a candidate, the doorbell rang.

“Oh,” she said. “That’s got to be Greg Casar. I forgot to tell you that he was going to be staying here.” This type of thing was such a common occurrence that Leah said she sometimes felt like she ran a “congressional Airbnb.” (Frost, for example, had been a guest on previous trips to Washington.)

Leah, dressed in a bright red dress, opened the door and greeted Casar, a bearded guy with noise-canceling headphones around his neck and a black-and-white Led Zeppelin shirt.

“Ben,” Leah said, “this is Greg Casar, the next congressman from Texas.”

Casar, a thirty-three-year-old community organizer and Austin city councilman, had recently won a primary in one of the only Democratic districts in Texas and was now on a glide path to Congress. Casar had earned early support from Leah and Way to Win for his work on affordable housing, paid sick leave, and living wage increases. He associated himself with various labels: Democratic Party, the Working Families Party, progressive.

“The last reporter you introduced me to, Ryan Grim, just called me boring,” Casar said, adding, “It was nice, said in a nice way. He thinks being a normie, a lefty in a Led Zeppelin shirt, is a good thing for the party.”

Casar was the kind of progressive success story that was at the core of Leah’s strategy: Get more progressives into Congress by running them in safe blue districts, where they only had to worry about winning primaries. The focus was mostly on open primaries, where there was no incumbent running for reelection, because those seats would be easiest for newcomers to claim.

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