Kendrick Meek: The Clarity Act is a Financial Inclusion Bill

Today, September 15, the Senate will hold a procedural vote on whether to move forward on the CLARITY Act. It's easy to read that as inside baseball – a cloture motion on a market-structure framework with another acronym in a long line of Washington acronyms. What it actually will be, however, is a test of whether Congress is listening to the Americans who have the most at stake in getting this right.

New survey data gives us a clear picture of who those Americans are, and the numbers should reframe how every senator thinks about this vote before they walk onto the floor this afternoon.*

Black and Hispanic Americans are leading on crypto.

Nearly half of Hispanic respondents (50%) and Black respondents (44%) say they currently own or have used crypto, which is well above the national average. Hispanic Americans are roughly twice as likely as the average American to say they're open to crypto; Black Americans are 1.5 times as likely to say they're "extremely" or "very" open to it.

These communities – those that have historically been underserved, overcharged, or locked out by the traditional financial system – are the ones voting with their wallets for something different. When 91% of Hispanic respondents and 83% of Black respondents say the financial services industry needs to change, they're describing a system they've already lived under, and an alternative they're already using.

They know what CLARITY is and they want it passed.

Awareness of the CLARITY Act is meaningfully higher among Hispanic respondents (55%) than the national average, and more than a third of Black respondents (37%) have heard of it too. Where there's awareness, there's conviction: both communities back the CLARITY Act by a 3:1 margin. Hispanic voters are three times more likely to support a candidate who backs the bill than one who doesn't; Black voters are twice as likely.

And this is now a voting issue.

More than one in three Hispanic voters (36%) and Black voters (34%) say a candidate's position on crypto will have a major impact on how they vote. In a midterm year with margins this tight, that's a meaningful coalition.

What this means for today.

Regulatory clarity for digital assets has largely been framed in Washington as a debate about market structure and innovation policy. All of that is true and all of that matters, but this data adds something Washington too often misses: CLARITY is also an equity issue. The communities asking loudest for functioning, trustworthy financial infrastructure are the ones who've had the least access to it, and they are telling us, directly, that they see the CLARITY Act as part of the answer.

Senators walking into this vote should understand who's watching. It's a broad and growing cross-section of the American electorate that has already decided crypto belongs in their financial lives, and wants Congress to catch up.

This cloture vote starts this work. A yes vote lets the Senate debate, amend, and improve the bill in the open. A no vote leaves millions of Americans, including many who've been failed by the old system, without the rules they've already told us they want. That's a straightforward choice.

Kendrick Meek is a former U.S. Congressman from Florida and currently serves as Director Emeritus of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.

*Source: Focaldata survey commissioned by Coinbase, July 2026. Nationally representative sample of n=2,064 U.S. adults 18+, including n=279 Hispanic and n=261 Black or African American respondents (openness question: n=139 and n=145, respectively). Demographic quotas and weighting applied across age, gender, education, ethnicity, voter registration, region, and past presidential vote.