Always On: The Crypto Political Switcheroo

Interest in buying and selling crypto has been ticking up since the 2024 U.S. presidential election. There’s a lot more nuance behind that trend though, as my colleague Sonnet Frisbie explores in her new memo. The recent shifts are relatively small and new demand is being driven by the audience that’s always been interested in crypto — men and high-income earners.

Put simply: Virtual currency is struggling to branch out to new audiences.

That said, there are some ways the existing crypto audience is changing. Because Morning Consult surveys tens of thousands across the globe every day, we can see shifts happen in custom audiences in real-time. For example, the portion of crypto exchange users who identify as Republican jumped 18 points from Jan. 2024 to Jan. 2025.

Behind the Curtain: Sourcing This Data

How is this audience defined? Anyone using Coinbase, Binance, Crypto.com or the Kraken Exchange once a month or more frequently. Clients of Morning Consult can explore this audience themselves, or easily create an alternative to their liking using different brands or demographics.

Morning Consult has conducted more than 93,000 interviews with this audience dating back to 2018. This is just one of the thousands of custom audiences you can build with Morning Consult Intelligence, thanks to the thousands of demographics, psychographics, brand usage and habits we survey about every day.

Want access yourself? Let’s talk.

Fast Facts About Users of Crypto Exchanges

Increasingly, this audience is more optimistic about the economy
49% of crypto exchange users think their finances will be better off in 12 months, which is 11 points higher than the general population and has been trending up.

Crypto exchange users are much more likely to be men
Just 29% of this audience in 2024 were women (compared with 71% who are men), a trend that has persisted for years.

Almost 1 in 2 are working from home weekly
49% of this audience is working from home at least once a week, which is 23 points higher than the general population.

They’re bigger e-consumers and much more online than the average population
Users of crypto exchanges are more likely to be active on every social media platform and every streaming service. They’re shopping online more, trying new products and are looking for the latest trends.

Let's Go Deeper

While some trends resonate nationally, others vary drastically by region or city. You can see those variances with new Morning Consult Intelligence Scorecards, which allow you to compare multiple brands, audiences, and metrics in one easy view.

Scorecards can be leveraged for many different applications — for example, you could compare trust, favorability and purchasing consideration amongst Gen Zers who live in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago and identify where your brand is stronger and weaker. Let’s do that quickly with Bitcoin.

Here, we can quickly see that Bitcoin is more popular, trusted and has higher purchasing consideration among Gen Z New Yorkers than those in Chicago or L.A.. Localized data gives brands the ability to drill down on messaging at a hyper-specific level. Clients can explore their own brand’s performance by building a new dashboard with a Scorecard.

Want to see how your target audience performs in major metros? Get in touch here.

Extra Credit

Normally, I like to feature supplementary reads for our audience in the extra credit section. This time, I want to give you a homework assignment: What are some audiences you’d like to see explored in Always On? Let me know at [email protected], and you might see your audience featured in a future edition of Always On. We track more than 2,000 demographic and audience attributes, hundreds of behaviors and habits and over a 100 psychographic indicators, which makes the possibilities endless.