Did Bitcoin actually care about US elections? The 2026 midterms and nine cycles before them

Updated 9 November 2026 with the 2026 midterms. Data for the new section: 2 to 9 November 2026 · perpetual futures on Binance, Bybit, OKX and Hyperliquid · MarketTrace consolidated candles, 15-minute state archive and liquidation tape · last pull 9 November 2026, 12:00 UTC. The 2008 to 2024 analysis is unchanged from the 8 May original. Descriptive microstructure, not financial advice.

On 3 November 2026 the US held its midterm elections, and Democrats won control of both the House and the Senate (ABC News). Bitcoin fell 2.8% while the votes were counted, rose 7.3% once the result was in and gave all of it back within a day. The biggest liquidation hour of the week came five days later, on a Sunday with no election news in it.

On November 5, 2024, the US elected Donald Trump for a second term. Bitcoin opened the day at $69,469 and was at $103,713 thirty days later, up 49%. ETH ran +57%. SOL ran +55%. The post-election bid pulled BTC through six figures for the first time in history.

On November 3, 2020, the US elected Joe Biden. Bitcoin opened the day at $13,950 and was at $19,860 thirty days later, up 42%. ETH ran roughly +50%. Same direction, opposite party.

Two presidents, two parties, two consecutive 30-day rallies of comparable magnitude. If elections moved Bitcoin in any straightforward way, those numbers would not exist together. They do.

This piece walks through every US election cycle since Bitcoin existed, with 2008 for context, and tries to separate the one election where the policy basket mattered (2024) from the ones where the calendar happened to overlap with something else. The 2026 midterms come first, hour by hour, from our own feeds.

The 2026 midterms, hour by hour

Bitcoin went into the vote under pressure from three things that had nothing to do with Congress. On 29 October Binance lost about $6.3 billion in a security breach (ABC News), and the 20:00 UTC hour that evening liquidated $263M across the eight assets we track. US spot bitcoin ETFs had $1.16B of net outflows across 30 October, 2 November and 3 November (ForkLog).

The third was the Fed. It hiked on 16 September for the first time since 2023 (our write-up of that week), and on 28 October it held with both dissents voting for another hike (HackerNoon). BTC closed 2 November at $76,791, more than 11% under its early-October high.

The outcome was the prediction markets' base case. On 2 November Polymarket priced a Democratic sweep of Congress at 72% on more than $51M of volume, and Kalshi at 70% (Bitcoin.com).

Liquidations: BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, DOGE, BNB, ZEC and ENA on Binance, Bybit and OKX, summed by UTC day; the feeds print a floor. BTC range: MarketTrace consolidated candles, the lowest and highest trade across Binance, Bybit, OKX and Hyperliquid. ETF flows: ForkLog. Friday: Bitcoin.com.

Election night: sold during the count, bought on the call

Polls began closing at 23:00 UTC, with BTC at $77,861, and the count ran into the Asian morning. By 03:08 UTC BTC was at $75,673, 2.8% lower. The TV networks had called the House for Democrats just before 03:00 UTC (Variety), and the hour that started at 04:00 closed 2.2% above the low. Dick Lo of TDX Strategies, quoted by ForkLog, put the turn down to less uncertainty.

The six hours from 23:00 UTC liquidated $94M across eight assets, 82% of it longs, $47M of it BTC. We count BTC open interest in coins, because that shows whether positions were opened or closed (why). It fell about 0.7% into the low and was back above its 23:00 level by 06:00. It is the pattern the later sections of this piece find across cycles, at small size: price fell while the outcome was unknown and recovered once it was known.

Wednesday: the rally was short covering

The second leg came with the US session. Thirty minutes after the 14:30 UTC cash open our detector logged $65.7M of BTC short liquidations in ten minutes. From 13:00 to 17:00 UTC the eight assets liquidated $189M, 95% of it shorts and $114M of it BTC. BTC printed $81,200 in the 15:00 UTC hour, 7.3% above the overnight low and 5.7% above the pre-vote close.

Between 14:00 and 15:15 UTC dollar open interest rose 1.5% while open interest in coins fell 1.7%. Positions were closing into the rally. In 2024 the post-election move lasted a month and came with a pre-announced crypto policy basket. In 2026 it lasted about a day, and the shorts paid for most of it.

Thursday: the Nasdaq took it back

On 5 November the Nasdaq Composite fell 5.52% and the S&P 500 4.36%, with AI and chip stocks leading (ForkLog). BTC went from $80,381 at 12:00 UTC to $75,511 within the 15:00 UTC hour, under the election-night low, and to $75,144 before midnight, 7.5% off Wednesday's high. US spot ETFs had $430.2M of net outflows that day.

It was the week's largest deleveraging. From 12:00 to 18:00 UTC the eight assets liquidated $291M, 92% of it longs. BTC open interest in coins fell 4.0% between 12:00 and 15:30 UTC, more than on election night or on Sunday.

Part of the coverage tied the AI selloff to the vote itself, citing worries that a Democratic Congress would tighten AI and crypto rules (FXStreet via TMGM). Tech stocks had been falling since before 3 November (ForkLog), so a crypto tape cannot say how much of Thursday belongs to the election. If the vote moved bitcoin after election night, it did so through the Nasdaq.

Sunday: the largest hour had no election in it

ETH moved first. Between 21:50 and the close of the 21:54 minute UTC on Sunday 8 November it fell 2.4% while BTC lost 0.6%. In the 21:55 minute both broke: BTC traded from $74,871 down to $73,333, its lowest price on our tape since 21 August, and ETH from $2,158.6 to $2,050.3, 5.0% inside one minute. Across the four venues, takers sold 10,525 BTC more than they bought in that minute.

The liquidation feeds printed $423M in the 21:00 UTC hour across the eight assets, 99.3% of it longs:

That is the largest hour in our 31 days of liquidation tape by a factor of 1.6. Second place, $263M, is 20:00 UTC on 29 October, the evening of the Binance breach. The two largest single orders printed on Binance 43 milliseconds apart at 21:55:39 UTC, a $48.16M ETH long and a $36.4M BTC long. CoinGlass, which aggregates more venues, has the same ETH order as the day's largest (Tech Times) and counted more than $1B over 24 hours, ETH $448M against BTC $272M (CoinDesk).

The book thinned out as it happened. Bids within 10 bps of mid fell from $70.1M at 21:45 to $31.8M at 22:00 on BTC, against a two-week median of $61.3M, and from $49.3M to $10.4M on ETH. Net taker selling over 30 minutes reached $1.18B on BTC and $960M on ETH. In two weeks of archive, only the night of the Binance breach ran a larger BTC figure, $1.35B.

CoinDesk tied the drop to two weekend headlines: Nvidia's board opening an independent investigation into reports about its chief executive, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying talks with Iran had stalled. Neither was on the election calendar. The BTC and ETH event pages keep the minute-by-minute record.

Our liquidation map got one thing right and one wrong. Its model held $1.56B of estimated BTC liquidations at the price levels the flush crossed; $89.5M printed near them, 6% of the estimate, and all 42 crossed levels had prints. Right levels, size overstated, the pattern we measured in How accurate are liquidation heatmaps?

Where positioning sits now

At noon UTC on Monday the two largest coins stood in different places.

BTC traders put back everything the flush removed within about eight hours. Open interest stood at 243,437 BTC before it, 238,173 at 22:15, 243,624 at 06:30 and 244,050 at noon. Longs are paying funding near the top fifth of its two-year range. ETH open interest never recovered. It kept shrinking into Monday morning, and funding turned negative.

Neither reading has meant much in the past. Over two years, BTC funding at or above the 75th percentile was followed by a 72-hour median return of −0.60%, up in 40% of 55 non-overlapping episodes. ETH funding at or below the 10th percentile was followed by −0.41% over 72 hours, up in 45% of 88. Low ETH funding has not, on average, led to a squeeze. The funding study covers the extremes.

The 2024 election: the only clean election trade

Election day November 5, 2024 was the cleanest political-event tape Bitcoin has ever printed.

Three things made it different from every prior cycle:

First, the result was not an in-line surprise. Polymarket had Trump at 50-55% in the final week; Kalshi at 51%. The market was priced for a coin flip. When the result locked in, the immediate move was relief from regulatory uncertainty rather than a regime shift.

Second, the policy basket was explicit and pre-announced. Trump's campaign had committed to a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, a pro-crypto SEC chair, and reversing SAB 121 (the bank crypto custody rule). The post-election rally was the market re-rating the probability of those committed actions, not extrapolating a vague "Republican = good" prior.

Third, an academic finding from a Tandfonline 2025 paper on political uncertainty and crypto: the post-election Trump-crypto-industry meeting in late November generated returns 5× larger than election night itself. Markets had priced the result but had not priced the speed of follow-through. The Strategic Bitcoin Reserve EO was signed March 6, 2025, five months later, with ~207,000 BTC committed under a no-sell mandate.

The clean read: this was the first US election where a candidate ran on, won on, and immediately delivered a crypto-specific policy basket. None of the previous nine cycles tested those three conditions together.

Certainty over party: the pattern that holds across cycles

The clearest read across the seven cycles where Bitcoin actually traded at meaningful size is that Bitcoin is largely indifferent to which party wins. The variable that gets priced is resolution of binding uncertainty.

The 30-day post-election BTC return for every cycle since 2012, with 2026 still provisional:

What the chart shows:

• Two parties, two consecutive 30-day rallies of comparable magnitude (Biden +42%, Trump +49%). If parties were the binding constraint, those two prints would not coexist.
• Two negative cycles in modern crypto (2018, 2022) trace to non-election collapse, not to election outcome. The "midterm crash" framing is a coincidence of dates.
• 2024 is the largest single print precisely because it stacked two effects: certainty resolution AND a substantive policy basket that had been pre-announced. Strip out the policy basket and you get something closer to 2020's +42% print, not +49%.
• The 2026 bar is provisional, day 6 of 30. So far it looks like the earlier midterms: the vote resolved, and other forces set the price.

The honest framing in two sentences:

1. Bitcoin is party-agnostic. The BTC trade does not depend on whether the result is Republican or Democrat.
2. The reliable election effect is uncertainty resolution, not partisan policy. The 2024 cycle was the cleanest because it resolved both election uncertainty and regulatory uncertainty at once. The 2020 cycle had only the first; it still rallied roughly the same magnitude on a 30-day horizon, suggesting certainty resolution by itself is the larger of the two effects.

The exception that proves the rule: 2016 Trump win produced only +10% in 30 days. The election uncertainty resolved, but BTC was already in a self-driving ICO mania that did not need the political tailwind. When the macro / market regime is dominant, the election barely registers. When the regime is balanced and waiting on a binding constraint to clear, the election unlocks the move.

The 2020 election: rally inside a larger move

The Biden 2020 rally is the most-cited counter-example to "elections don't matter." It is also the strongest case for the opposite. The calendar overlapped with a move that was already in motion.

By election day Nov 3, 2020, the institutional bull was three months in:

• August 11, 2020: MicroStrategy's first $250M BTC purchase. Saylor's first earnings call defending the strategy followed in early September.
• September 22, 2020: Stone Ridge Holdings discloses a $115M BTC position; Square (now Block) announces $50M.
• October 8, 2020: Square announces $50M BTC purchase as 1% of treasury.
• October 21, 2020: PayPal launches crypto buy/sell/hold for 26M US merchant network, single biggest retail distribution event in BTC's history to that date.
• November 3, 2020: Election day. BTC at $13,950, already +83% YTD.

Then the Biden 30-day window:

• November 4-30, 2020: BTC $13,950 → $19,860 (+42%). The previous all-time high (December 2017) was $19,783. This window broke ATH for the first time in three years.
• December 16, 2020: Crossed $20,000 for the first time ever.
• December 31, 2020: $29,001.

The Biden administration's crypto policy when it arrived was hostile. The Gensler SEC pursued enforcement against Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, and Ripple. If the 2020 rally were a Biden effect, the rally should have continued or stalled politely; instead, the 2022 bear was driven by Fed tightening plus exchange failures. The 2020 election sits inside the move, but the policy that actually arrived was the opposite of the price action.

The cleaner read is that certainty mattered, party did not. A contested or delayed result might have produced a different short-term move, but the 30-day reading is institutional QE-cycle noise, not a Biden bid.

The 2022 midterms: not an election story

The 2022 midterms are routinely cited as a "crypto crash on midterms" event. The dates do not support that framing.

The election day intraday low of $17,300 was the FTX bank run hitting maximum velocity inside the 24-hour Binance acquisition flip-flop. SOL specifically lost 77% over six weeks because Alameda was its second-largest holder with ~$1.2B in SOL-linked positions; Solana's structural exposure made it the leveraged short of the trade, exactly as it was the leveraged long in 2024.

For comparison, the 2018 midterms (Nov 6, 2018, Democrats took the House) saw BTC fall 37% in November alone. The catalyst was the Bitcoin Cash hard fork on November 14, breaking the $6,000 support that had held since the August 2018 bottom; the broader 2018 bear was an ICO-bubble unwind plus Mt. Gox trustee selling and the first full year of CME futures-enabled shorting. The election was a calendar coincidence inside a structural unwind that had been in motion for a year.

Two midterms, two large moves, zero attributable election cause. The midterms don't read as a crypto event. 2026 makes it three: the vote moved BTC for about a day, and the week's largest liquidations came from a Nasdaq rout and a Sunday flush (see the 2026 section above).

2016 Trump first term: footnote in a 2,700% move

The 2016 Trump win produced a small overnight BTC bid as the dollar weakened on the surprise result and a brief safe-haven narrative attached. But BTC was already up 68% YTD heading into the election. The 30-day window was a sleepy +10%, well within the year's regular volatility.

ETH sold off in the same window. The cause was DAO hack damage from June 2016 still working through (price had fallen $20 → $8) plus the Ethereum / Ethereum Classic chain split debate. ETH was its own story.

The real 2016-2017 story was BTC's $700 to $19,783 run over 13 months. The election was a footnote inside a retail mania driven by ICO speculation, the Coinbase consumer onboarding ramp, and the first full year of Asian retail volume mattering.

2014, 2012, 2010, 2008: no signal

The pre-2016 cycles are short to summarize because Bitcoin was either too small for elections to register or did not exist yet.

2014 midterms (Nov 4, 2014). BTC was ~$330-350 on election day, already in deep bear from the December 2013 ATH of $1,163 driven by Mt. Gox's February 2014 collapse (850,000 BTC lost, 70% of global volume vaporized). The midterms produced no observable BTC move. By year-end BTC was ~$275; the post-Gox bear continued through January 2015.

2012 presidential election (Nov 6, 2012). BTC was ~$11-13 on election day. The first BTC halving was 22 days later on November 28, the price-relevant event. Halving day price was $12.35. Crypto market cap was tens of millions of dollars, total user count in the low five figures. Elections were not a thing crypto could care about.

2010 midterms (Nov 2, 2010). BTC's all-time high for 2010 of $0.39 was reached around election week. There were hundreds of users and no exchange in any meaningful sense. This is a coincidence in the strict mathematical sense: probability of one calendar event landing near another, no causal channel possible.

2008 presidential election (Nov 4, 2008). Bitcoin did not exist on election day. But it is the most narratively important election in crypto history. The Bitcoin whitepaper was published October 31, 2008, four days before the Obama vs McCain vote. Lehman Brothers had failed seven weeks earlier. The TARP $700B bailout was signed October 3. The Genesis block on January 3, 2009 carried the message "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks". Bitcoin was not a reaction to who won. Both Obama and McCain endorsed TARP. It was a reaction to the bailouts both candidates supported.

That framing, Bitcoin as a hedge against the policy consensus rather than a partisan trade, has held for every cycle since.

What actually moves Bitcoin

If elections produced one clean political move in nine tries, what does drive BTC at scale? The answer in the data is that bank crises, exchange failures, and Fed liquidity cycles each dwarf any election effect.

Bank crises pump

Cyprus 2013 was Bitcoin's first major mainstream "bank-is-unsafe" moment. CNN ran the safe-haven framing for the first time. The pattern: BTC sells off briefly with risk assets in the acute panic phase, then recovers and surges within 1-4 days as the "where do I put cash?" trade activates. SVB 2023 reproduced the pattern almost perfectly: Silvergate (Mar 8) + SVB (Mar 10) + Signature (Mar 12) collapsed together; USDC depegged to $0.87; BTC fell to $19,670 then ran +32% in four days.

Those moves are 30-50% in 1-4 weeks. The largest single elections produce 10-15% on the same horizon. Bank crisis > election by an order of magnitude.

Exchange failures crash

Exchange failures are the most reliable BTC crash signal. Each event has the same shape: counterparty risk discovery → forced sales → liquidation cascades → bottom. The 2022 cluster wiped the entire 2020-2021 bull. The 2014 Mt. Gox collapse started a 2-year bear.

Every Bitcoin crash from −50% to −82% in the recorded record traces to a funding-side or exchange-side break, not to a price-discovery event. News alone does not produce structural drawdowns. Counterparty failure does.

COVID liquidity is its own category

The March 12, 2020 COVID liquidity event remains the single largest 24-hour BTC drop in the public record. $1B+ in longs liquidated. BTC behaved as a risk asset, not a safe haven, when correlation went to 1 across every asset class. This is the opposite of Bitcoin's "digital gold" narrative, and the data are unambiguous about which one is true under acute liquidity stress.

The recovery was equally dramatic: BTC ran from $3,600 to $69,000 over the 20 months following Black Thursday, driven by the Fed's $4T+ QE response. Same liquidity break that crashed BTC into March produced the largest bull cycle in history once it reversed.

Fed liquidity cycles dominate everything

The single most reliable predictor of BTC's macro-horizon return is whether the Fed is expanding or contracting its balance sheet. Across the five regimes above, every period of QE produced large rallies; every period of QT produced bears. Where political events sat inside those regimes mattered for short-term timing, not for direction.

The 2024 Trump win is the cleanest exception, but even there the September 2024 Fed 50bps cut was a contributing condition. Strip out the Fed easing and the rally probably still happens, but smaller and slower.

The relative magnitude across event types is best seen side-by-side. The largest single move of each kind, on the same horizon (30-day or shorter where the move was faster):

The implication: if you want to time BTC around political risk, the political event itself is rarely the largest reachable move in the 30-day window. The chart above is the best summary of why we lead with macro and event analysis on this site rather than partisan analysis.

Funding now

The widget below is live. At 12:00 UTC on 9 November BTC funding sat at the 79th percentile of two years and ETH at the 6th, the split described in the 2026 section.

Asset · last 7 cycles (Binance)↑Binance—sort ↓Bybit—sort ↓OKX—sort ↓Hyperliquid—sort ↓

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cell tint · |percentile − 50| · stronger = further from venue mediannegativepositivecollecting

How we calculate this →

For how the percentile is computed, the funding methodology page walks through the formulas and edge cases. For a worked example of funding ahead of a move, see the 25-day stretch where shorts paid for the rally in March and April 2026.

What we expected in May, and what happened

In May this section set out what the prediction markets expected from 3 November and how we thought the market would react. Each call, against the record:

What is on the calendar

US inflation data is due on 10 November (crypto.news). The lame-duck session runs from mid-November to late December and is the CLARITY Act's last realistic window in this Congress (Crypto Briefing); the new Congress, with Democratic majorities in both chambers, sits from January. The Fed decides on 9 December; after the October meeting CME FedWatch put a hike at 85% (HackerNoon, citing Reuters). The 30-day window for this cycle closes on 3 December.

Methodology

Election-window returns are computed close-on-the-day-before to close at D+30 (the 30-day post-election window). Source for daily prices: Yahoo Finance for spot, plus exchange APIs (Binance for BTC, Bitfinex for ETH pre-Coinbase listing, FTX International archives for SOL pre-2022 where available). Pre-2014 BTC prices are reconstructed from Mt. Gox closing prices via the BitMEX historical dataset.

Election dates are the official federal results date (general election Tuesday after first Monday of November). Returns are not market-on-close adjusted for asynchronous trading hours; crypto trades 24/7 and the cited windows include all hours.

The "9 cycles" sample is the seven cycles since Bitcoin existed (2010 through 2024) plus 2008 and 2012 included for context with explicit non-data marker. 2026 makes it ten; its 30-day window closes on 3 December. Geopolitical and exchange-failure event dates use the announcement / formal start date rather than rumor onset.

For the 2026 section we used our own feeds. Prices are MarketTrace consolidated candles, trades from Binance, Bybit, OKX and Hyperliquid on one timeline, so a low is the lowest trade on any of the four. It can sit under an index price: CoinDesk's Sunday low was about $73,761, ours $73,333. Liquidations come from the Binance, Bybit and OKX feeds; Hyperliquid publishes none. Dollar values use each venue's reference price, and Bybit and OKX report the bankruptcy price, so they are estimates. Binance sends at most one liquidation per symbol per second and OKX publishes a sample, so every total here is a floor. Open interest in coins is consolidated dollar open interest divided by the consolidated price at each 15-minute snapshot. Net taker flow is aggressive buys minus aggressive sells over 30 minutes across the four venues. Funding base rates come from 730 days of cross-venue funding history, with overlapping windows collapsed into independent episodes. The 31-day ranking covers liquidations from 9 October 13:00 to 9 November 12:00 UTC, the span our raw tape holds. News times come from the linked sources, converted to UTC.

This is a descriptive event study. The intent is to characterize what happened, not to predict the next cycle.

What this is and isn't

The sample is N=10 election cycles (2026 still inside its 30-day window) plus 13 non-election event-shocks. That is a modest sample with high event variance. Single-event interpretations are weak; the cross-event pattern is the load-bearing finding.

Selection bias: "election cycles" is a clean universe, but the non-election shocks (bank crises, exchange failures, COVID) were chosen because they each delivered the largest single move of their kind. Smaller events with unclear attribution are not included and might shift means slightly if added.

Reverse causation matters in each "election rally" case. BTC was inside a halving + macro cycle independent of the political event, so some part of every observation would have happened without the election. The 2024 case has the cleanest causal channel because the policy basket was concrete and pre-announced; that case scores 1 of 10.

Macro overlay. Fed regime explains more variance than any election. Disentangling the two is non-trivial and is not attempted here. The implicit claim is that politics is a smaller force than macro, not that politics is zero.

The May read was conditional. The "what to watch" section, now the scorecard above, read base-case probabilities rather than setting a price target, and its base case, a divided Congress, did not happen.

In May we wrote that a 2018-style outcome, where the calendar didn't matter and macro did, would strengthen the case for macro dominance. Six days in, 2026 looks like one: the election set the price for one night, and the Nasdaq and forced selling set it after. One cycle is one observation, and the comparable number is the 30-day return on 3 December.

Check it yourself

The 2026 numbers come from the feeds that run the site: the liquidation tape, the cascade pages for each flush, positioning for open interest and taker flow by venue, and funding. AI assistants can query the same archive over MCP.

How to cite this post

MarketTrace (2026). "Did Bitcoin actually care about US elections? The 2026 midterms and nine cycles before them." Event study, updated 9 November 2026. https://markettrace.ai/blog/did-bitcoin-care-about-elections

Frequently asked questions

How did Bitcoin react to the 2026 midterm elections?

It moved for about a day. BTC fell 2.8% while votes were counted, to $75,673 at 03:08 UTC on 4 November, then rose 7.3% to $81,200 on Wednesday after Democrats were projected to win both chambers. Most of that rally was short covering. By 15:00 UTC on Thursday, with the Nasdaq down 5.5% on an AI-led selloff, BTC was back under its election-night low. At 12:00 UTC on 9 November it was 3.2% below its 2 November close.

How much crypto was liquidated after the 2026 midterms?

From 3 November 00:00 to 9 November 12:00 UTC, Binance, Bybit and OKX liquidated $1.42B across BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, DOGE, BNB, ZEC and ENA, 73% of it longs. Election day itself was quiet at $66M. The largest hour was 21:00 UTC on Sunday 8 November: $423M, 99% longs, with ETH at $228M and BTC at $137M. CoinGlass, which covers more venues, counted more than $1B over the 24 hours around it.

Did the midterms cause the 8 November crypto crash?

Nothing on the election calendar fell on that Sunday. CoinDesk tied the drop to two weekend headlines: Nvidia's board opening an investigation into reports about its chief executive, and stalled US-Iran talks. The flush ran from 21:51 to 21:59 UTC. ETH fell first, and in the 21:55 minute BTC traded down to $73,333, its lowest price on MarketTrace's tape since 21 August, while ETH touched $2,050.

Did the May 2026 read on the midterms hold?

Partly. In May, prediction markets made a divided Congress the likeliest result; Democrats won both chambers, an outcome Polymarket priced at 72% by 2 November. The market call held up better: after election night BTC traded with the Nasdaq and its own leverage, and crypto-policy news barely registered. Rates went the other way from the cut scenario we sketched. The Fed hiked on 16 September and held on 28 October with two votes for another hike.

Did the 2024 Trump election actually move Bitcoin?

Yes, more than any prior election. BTC opened election day at $69,469 and closed +49% over 30 days, hitting $103,713 on December 5, 2024. ETH +57%, SOL +55% over the same window. The size of the move and the explicit pro-crypto policy basket (Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, Atkins SEC, EOs) make this the first US election with a clean causal story for crypto.

Did Bitcoin react to the 2020 Biden win?

BTC rallied +42% in the 30 days after Nov 3, 2020 ($13,950 to $19,860) and +108% in 58 days. The election was inside the move but not the driver. The 2020 bull cycle was already underway from October on MicroStrategy's first $250M BTC buy (Aug 11, 2020), PayPal's crypto announcement (Oct 21, 2020), and pandemic QE. Both parties were running expansive fiscal programs.

Did the 2022 midterms crash crypto?

No. The FTX bank run started two days before the Nov 8 vote and consumed crypto for the rest of November. BTC fell from $20,874 to $17,300 intraday on election day, but every datapoint in the move traces to FTT, Alameda exposure, and the Binance acquisition cycle, not the split-Congress result. SOL lost 77% over six weeks because Alameda was its second-largest holder, not because of the midterms.

What about 2008, 2012, 2016, 2018?

For 2008 and 2012, Bitcoin was either pre-launch or below $15 with no institutional coverage; elections were noise inside larger moves. The 2016 Trump win produced a +3.8% overnight bid and a quiet recovery while BTC was already +68% YTD. The 2018 midterms coincided with a bear market driven by Bitcoin Cash hard fork uncertainty and the wider ICO bust; the November leg was −37% and had no measurable election attribution.

Sources

2026 midterms and election week:

• Results and calls: ABC News live results, Variety on the House calls, ForkLog on election night
• Prediction-market odds on 2 November: Bitcoin.com
• Binance breach: ABC News
• ETF flows and the 5 November equity selloff: ForkLog; the AI selloff and the new Congress: FXStreet via TMGM
• Fed: HackerNoon on 28 October; the September hike and the Clarity vote: MarketTrace, Senate roll call 234
• 8 November: CoinDesk, Tech Times on the largest order, Bitcoin.com on Friday's dip
• Lame-duck window: Crypto Briefing; calendar: crypto.news
• MarketTrace event pages: BTC, 4 November, 15:00 UTC, BTC, 8 November, 21:51 UTC, ETH, 8 November, 21:50 UTC

Original May 2026 version (2008 to 2024 cycles and the pre-vote context):

Election-cycle prices and timelines compiled from CoinCodex, CoinMarketCap historical snapshots, CoinGecko, and primary exchange API archives. Federal election outcomes via official Federal Election Commission records. Prediction market probabilities as of May 8, 2026 from Polymarket and Kalshi.

Specific event-day price data:

• Trump 2024 victory rally: The Block, PBS NewsHour, CNBC Nov 5, 2024
• Biden 2020 + post-election institutional flow: Bloomberg Dec 2020, CNBC Dec 16 2020
• 2022 FTX collapse + midterm crossover: CNBC Nov 9 2022, CoinDesk SOL/Alameda
• 2018 midterm bear: BeInCrypto, CNBC
• 2016 Trump first-term + ETH DAO context: Fortune, CoinDesk 2016 review
• Cyprus 2013 + SVB 2023 bank-crisis pattern: CNN Money, CoinDesk SVB
• Black Thursday COVID 2020: CNBC Mar 13 2020, CryptoPotato 2-year retro
• Strategic Bitcoin Reserve EO: White House Mar 2025, CNBC Mar 6 2025
• 2026 midterm context: CoinDesk midterms preview, CoinDesk voter priorities, Blockonomi divided-Congress framing
• Fed policy 2026: CNBC FOMC April 2026
• Academic context: Political uncertainty and crypto markets, Tandfonline 2025, Republican vs Democrat crypto policy, GWU Regulatory Studies

Related

→ Two blows, one build: bitcoin through the Clarity vote, the Fed hike and $80K

→ How accurate are liquidation heatmaps? What the map knows and what it guesses

→ The biggest liquidations in crypto history (and what they actually looked like)