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The Democratic National Committee (DNC) is out with a new set of ads knocking Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) over a recently released memo laying out what he thinks the GOP agenda should be if Republicans recapture control of the Senate this year.

The four-figure digital ad buy is set to begin running on Saturday in the Villages, Fla., ahead of Scotts speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Fla.

Rick Scott and the Republican Party have made their agenda crystal clear: they want to raise taxes on over half of Americans including seniors and retirees without offering a single proposal to lower costs for hardworking families, Allyson Bayless, a spokeswoman for the DNC, said in a statement.

This is the Republican Partys official platform, and the DNC will use every resource at our disposal to make sure voters know exactly what Republicans stand for, she added.

Scotts 31-page memo, which he released on Tuesday, offers a glimpse of his vision for what a Republican majority in the Senate might pursue. Among the ideas outlined in the memo is a call for all Americans to pay at least some income tax.

The plan was met with immediate criticism from Democrats, who accused Scott of pushing for new taxes for low-income Americans. But the memo also received some criticism from Republicans, who have sought to make the 2022 midterm elections a referendum on Democratic control of Washington.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnellAddison (Mitch) Mitchell McConnellOvernight Health Care Presented by Alexion Battle lines drawn over COVID-19 funding Pelosi says Boebert and Greene 'should just shut up' Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey tells donors he won't run for Senate MORE (R-Ky.) notably declined last year to release an agenda ahead of the midterms.

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Democrats hit Scott over agenda in new ads | TheHill - The Hill

The bills enjoy broad support the 42 co-sponsors of Ms. Spanbergers TRUST in Congress Act include Representatives Matt Gaetz of Florida, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Andy Harris of Maryland, all firmly in the Trump wing of their party and if anything, they are putting Ms. Pelosi in the spotlight.

You have the speaker of the House out there trading, and her husband making millions and millions of dollars a year, Mr. Hawley said.

Democrats are just as eager to contrast their position with Ms. Pelosis. They said her refusal in December to consider a stock trading ban Were a free-market economy, she said when asked about the push made the issue a cause clbre.

The speaker, I dont want to directly call her out, but handfuls of members have put dozens and dozens of years here. They come at this from a different time and a different perspective, said Ms. Stevens, who has found herself almost certainly facing another Democrat, Andy Levin, in the upcoming House primaries in redistricted Michigan. Both signed on to last weeks letter demanding action on a trading ban.

Democratic leaders remain leery. They argue that once Congress begins trying to regulate its own members out of investments, it is difficult to draw the line between what is permissible and what is not. If stock ownership is forbidden because it could create a conflict with legislating, would having student loan debt make it inappropriate for a member to press for loan relief? Would owning real estate confer an improper personal interest in environmental or land-use policy?

Mr. Roy allowed that there were complexities, but, he said, a line had to be drawn.

If youre talking about dirt, well, are you talking about your family farm or are you engaging in thousands of real estate transactions? he asked. Are you buying and selling and engaging in commercial real estate transactions development while youre in Congress? There are limits to what were supposed to do.

Drew Hammill, Ms. Pelosis deputy chief of staff, said the speaker had asked Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and the chairwoman of the Committee on House Administration, to examine an array of proposals to regulate lawmakers trading, including a ban on owning stocks. Ms. Lofgren is also looking at increasing penalties for unacceptable noncompliance with the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, a 2012 law that mandates that lawmakers disclose their stock trading, a step he said Ms. Pelosi supports.

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Democrats Break With Leaders Over Congressional Stock Trading - The New York Times

Residents wait in line to vote outside of the Tippecanoe branch library on Oct. 20, 2020, in Milwaukee, Wis. Minimum standards for access to in-person early voting are one reform that both Republicans and Democrats have backed. Scott Olson/Getty Images hide caption

Residents wait in line to vote outside of the Tippecanoe branch library on Oct. 20, 2020, in Milwaukee, Wis. Minimum standards for access to in-person early voting are one reform that both Republicans and Democrats have backed.

Earlier this year, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called a targeted effort by some senators to reform the election certification process that former President Donald Trump attempted to hijack on Jan. 6, 2021, "unacceptably insufficient and even offensive."

Schumer wanted to go bigger.

He wanted to focus on much more expansive voting rights legislation, known as the Freedom to Vote Act, which would have overhauled essentially everything about the American election system: when and where Americans could cast a ballot, how they contribute to political campaigns and how states draw their political lines.

The proposal was trimmed down from an even larger elections bill, but it was still so massive that many election experts and even some Democrats privately say they never actually expected it to pass.

Then it failed.

Democrats in Congress haven't made it clear what they might pursue next, but experts see at least two paths toward a more piecemeal approach to putting in some guardrails around elections in the U.S.

The option gaining momentum recently is an update to the aforementioned rules around presidential election certification, known as the Electoral Count Act.

The law has been derided as poorly written and vague for decades, and its lack of clarity led to the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump supporters falsely believed Vice President Mike Pence had more power over the certification of Electoral College votes submitted by the states than he actually did.

A bipartisan group of senators has been meeting to discuss potential revisions to the law, and there are indications that Schumer's opposition to it may be softening since the larger Democratic effort on voting rights failed.

Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California-Irvine, said that he feels the voting reforms in the Freedom to Vote Act are necessary too, but Congress would be right to prioritize the ECA and other laws meant to prevent subversion of the results of a presidential election.

"As much as one might be concerned about voter suppression and I've written two books on the subject, I'm very concerned about it I put the concern about election subversion even higher," Hasen said. "If you don't have a system where votes are fairly counted, you don't have a democracy at all."

The bipartisan group of senators looking at changing the law is working in smaller groups focused on a number of different aspects of voting reform, according to Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who spoke to reporters Monday night after the group met on Capitol Hill.

Each of the smaller groups has a Democrat and Republican co-chair, Collins said, and they are focused on protecting election workers and potential new funding for election administration, in addition to updating the ECA. But she made it clear she thinks whatever legislation that comes from the group will not look anything like the Freedom to Vote Act.

"My goal is to have a bipartisan bill that can secure 60 or more votes in the Senate," she said. "If we re-litigate issues that have already been rejected by the Senate, then I think it would be very difficult for us to reach the 60-vote margin."

The bipartisan group of 16 senators, which includes nine Republicans, is set to meet again on Friday and could start writing text for their proposal in the coming days or weeks. The GOP support is key, since Democrats would need 10 Republicans in agreement to pass a measure in the Senate.

"This group is full of members of the Senate that have experience in getting bipartisan bills to the floor of the Senate. So maybe this group will be more successful," said Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy, a member of the group.

On Tuesday, a group of key Democratic senators also separately released their own potential draft update to the ECA. In some cases, the plan by Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Angus King, I-Maine, mirrors proposals that were part of a House Administration Committee staff report released last month.

For example, it says that for an objection to a state's election results to be raised before Congress, the current threshold of only needing one member from each chamber should be raised. Rather, the Senate Democratic proposal, like the House staff report, suggests that one-third of each chamber should have to object. Both Democratic plans also say objections should be subject to a vote by a supermajority not a simple majority in both the House and Senate.

"We stand ready to share the knowledge we have accumulated with our colleagues from both parties and look forward to contributing to a strong, bipartisan effort aimed at resolving this issue and strengthening our democracy," Durbin, Klobuchar and King said in a statement on Tuesday.

King and several members of the bipartisan group agreed they see a potential to work together.

"I'm going to work with anybody who wants to work on the issue," King said.

Alaska GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski, another member of bipartisan group, says the various efforts signal momentum.

"I think what that telegraphs is that this is important and it's something that we can move through on a bipartisan basis," Murkowski said.

The level of bipartisan engagement on the ECA never coalesced around the other voting rights reforms Democrats had hoped would come from this Congress, which have grown more urgent as some states across the country passed laws last year restricting voting access.

Republicans have often said they have no interest in federalizing the nuts and bolts of election infrastructure, so mandating things like automatic voter registration or no-excuse absentee voting was a nonstarter.

But Matthew Weil thinks there is another way.

Weil leads the elections project at the Bipartisan Policy Center, which recently released a report detailing what it sees as an "achievable" set of reforms for Congress to focus on.

"Both parties have prioritized elections to their voters," said Weil. "Democrats have been spending a lot of time talking about voter suppression and voters from the Republican Party are hearing that our election system is completely insecure."

BPC's proposal would address both concerns, Weil says, meaning there's a way for politicians to sell it to their voters no matter their affiliation.

Importantly, the BPC report does not argue for federal mandates, but instead argues for an incentivization structure where federal funding would be tied to whether states meet minimum accessibility and security standards such as:

Nine states that range across the political spectrum either currently already meet all of the report's minimum standards or meet all but one. Both Colorado and Georgia meet all of the proposed minimum standards for instance, even though Colorado is a vote-by-mail state and Georgia leans more heavily on in-person voting.

Because of the incentive structure, the proposal also might be an easier sell to Republicans like Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who worry about federal overreach. LaRose staunchly opposed the Freedom to Vote Act, calling it a power grab on the part of Democrats.

But in an interview with NPR recently, LaRose said he had read the BPC report and that he could see supporting similar legislation. Ohio already complies with more than 80% of the report's standards.

Weil, of the BPC, sees parallels to 2002 when Congress passed a bipartisan set of election reforms in the shadow of the 2000 presidential election, one of the closest and most contentious in modern history.

"Both parties had incentives to do something about the elections process," Weil said. "I think I see some of those same possibilities now."

NPR's Claudia Grisales contributed to this report.

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There are election reforms that both Democrats and Republicans seem to like - NPR

Introduction

As President Biden begins his second year in office and the battle for control of Congress in 2022 heats up, Democrats find themselves in a deep hole. Early in Bidens administration, 55% of Americans approved of his performance; today, his job approval has fallen to 42%. Polls conducted during the past three weeks show Democrats trailing Republicans by an average of 4 percentage points in the aggregate vote for the House of Representatives.[1]

This disadvantage in the generic House vote is even more significant than it appears. Because Democratic votes are distributed less efficiently among congressional districts than are Republican votes, Democrats need an edge of at least 2.5 percentage points to retain control. In 2016, a Republican advantage of just 1 percentage point translated into a 47-seat House majority. In 2012, a 1-point Democratic popular vote advantage left Republicans with a 33-seat majority. By contrast, it took a massive 8.6 percentage popular vote victory to give Democrats a comparable 36-seat majority in 2018.

Contrary to early expectations, the redistricting process after the 2020 Census is likely to leave the Houses existing partisan tilt about where it is now. But the parties have pursued different strategies. While Republicans have focused on making their seats safer, Democrats have sought to increase the number of districts where they have a reasonable chance of winning. This strategy will increase Democratic gains when the popular vote balance is favorable to them, but at the cost of increasing their losses when the vote turns against them. In these circumstances, the Republicans current 4-point edge in the generic House vote would likely produce a massive seat swing in their direction.

There is a strong relationship between President Bidens public standing and Democrats prospects in the forthcoming midterm elections. A recent study found that in this era of polarized and nationalized politics, a presidents job approval does more to influence midterms than does any other factor. Another analysis shows that Bidens low job approval in swing states is weakening Democratic candidates for the Senate. Unless Biden can move his approval from the low to the high-40s, Democrats have virtually no chance of retaining their House majority or of continuing to control the Senate.

Voters have downgraded their evaluation of the presidents performance across the board, but his losses on two key issues that were key to his campaigndealing with the pandemic and bringing the country togetherhave been especially steep.

To understand what it would take for President Biden to improve his public standing, lets examine which voters have moved from approval to disapproval, and why. A recently released report from the Pew Research Center offers some answers.

In early 2021, when public approval for President Biden was at its peak, support among Independent voters who said they lean toward the Democrats stood at 88%, nearly as high as among voters who identify as Democrats (95%), and differences between strong and not-strong Democrats were insignificant. Since then, the gap between these groups has widened significantly. While the presidents ratings among Democrats have declined by 19 percentage points (from 95% to 76%), they have declined by 32 percentage points among Leaners, and a 22-point gap has opened between those who say they are strong and not strong Democrats.

Data provided by Pew show a strong correlation between these shifts and ideological differences among Democratic support groups. Simply put, strong Democrats, a group dominated by liberals, continue to approve of the presidents performance much more than do not-strong Democrats and Democratic leaners, who have strong majorities of moderate and conservative voters. Liberals make up 56% of strong Democrats, compared to just 40% of not-strong Democrats and 36% of Independents who lean toward the Democrats.

Other survey data supports Pews findings. For example, compare two polls conducted by the Economist and YouGov, the first in mid-March of 2021, the second in the third week of January 2022. Among all voters, President Bidens job approval has declined by 15 points. But it has declined by 21 points among Independents and 22 points among moderates.

A Gallup survey, which examined the impact of partisanship but not ideology, found that the decline in Bidens personal ratings was driven mainly by shifts among Independents.

A key reason for these shiftsmoderates and Independents now view President Biden as less moderate and more liberal than they did at the beginning of his administration. When asked to place Biden on the ideological spectrum from very liberal to very conservative, heres what they said:

During this period, moreover, the share of these voters who saw Biden as very liberal rose by 6 percentage points among both moderates and liberals.

While President Biden has suffered reverses across the board, he has lost more ground among voters in the center of the electorate than on the left. If he is to regain support among moderates and Independents, he must work harder to overcome their objections to the way he has positioned himself during his first year in officeincluding their perception that he has governed farther to the left than they expected when they voted for him in 2020.

[1] Source: authors calculation based on polls conducted January 12-26, 2022.

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Can President Biden and the Democrats get out of the hole? - Brookings Institution

Finding a way to win in red states is of critical importance to Democrats because of the structural advantages that the senate and electoral college give to rural areas. Democrats can and do run candidates in rural states whose actual policies appeal to local voters. But these candidates usually get crushed at the polls because many voters who agree with the local Democrat on specific issues see Democrats generally as a bunch of liberal elites who hate them and who want to impose extreme left policies on them. Even many red-state voters who are positively disposed to more liberal economic policies still see Democrats are them not us.

In marketing speak, when it comes to red-state voters, local Democratic candidates have a branding problem rather than a product problem but its a problem that has a known solution in the commercial marketplace: Create a flanker brand.

Consider for example, Levis attempt in the early 1980s to launch a line of mens business suits. The products failed miserably, not because people thought there was anything wrong with the suits themselves, but because they would be embarrassed to wear a suit from Levis. Levis learned from this debacle in two ways. First, the company created a new line of clothing that was business casual, rather than formal business suits, so the new line was only moderately different from their existing products. But even if people liked the actual clothing, they still felt uncomfortable wearing Levis to work. So, Levis created a flanker brand, Dockers, and the rest is history.

To win in red states, Democrats need a flanker brand.

The timid version of this idea would use a name that included the word Democrat, along the lines of the term progressive Democrat, only with very different politics, a clearer definition of what the term means, and a sharper distinction between the new brand and the main Democratic party. The goal would be to create and aggressively promote a social identity around the new brand, so that being a such-and-such Democrat meant something different from just being a Democrat.

A more powerful, but also riskier, approach would be to pick a name for this brand that didnt include the word Democrat.

The story of DeWalt is relevant here. Black and Decker used to have two brands: Black and Decker, which is for doing occasional projects around the house, and a flanker brand called Black and Decker Professional for use on construction sites. Construction workers, however, were proud of their skills and identity, and didnt want to use the same tools as suburban homeowners. Simply adding the word Professional to the tools wasnt enough to get actual professionals to buy them. So Black and Decker changed the name of the flanker brand tools to DeWalt and changed the color to yellow yet made no changes to the actual mechanics of the tools. DeWalt became the most-trusted, best-selling tools in their class.

For voters, choosing a party is very much about identity. What does it mean to be a Democrat or a Republican? Who do I want to be? How do I want other people to see me?

It might be the case that to create a new symbolic identity for the flanker brand, it would need to have a distinct name and other trappings of an independent group. The goal would not be to deceive voters about the groups connection to the Democratic party, but rather to allow red state voters to have a different emotional reaction to the new brand. For example, it is no secret that Chevy and Cadillac are both made by General Motors, but each brand has a largely independent identity in the mind of consumers.

Of course, there would be a big debate between Democrats and Republicans over whether the new group is really something different, or just progressive Democrats in disguise. But that debate would help publicize the new brand. Democrats dont need 100 percent of voters to accept the their positioning for the new flanker brand just enough people to find it attractive that Democrats can start winning some elections in red states.

What might this new flanker brand look like? Theres a large number of voters who are centrist to center-right on social issues, yet lean left on economic issues. Ill can call these voters soft-populist to distinguish them from more hard-populist voters who are energized by, among other things, racist rhetoric. These soft-populist voters are a perfect target market for a new Democratic flanker brand. This soft-populist group is vastly larger than its mirror image libertarian group, who are liberal on social issues yet more conservative on economic issues. Many of these soft populists voted for Trump, yet dont have a natural home in a Republican party that wants more tax cuts for the rich, cuts to social programs, and an end to Obama care.

Democrats have accurately argued for years to these soft-populists that the government has a lot of influence over the kinds of economic policy issues they agree with the Democrats on, yet relatively little influence over the culture war issues they agree with the Republicans on. So, when choosing a government, it makes sense to vote Democratic. Unfortunately, culture war issues resonate with peoples sense of identity in a way that economic issues do not.

As all politics have increasingly become identity politics, the Republicans have been able to win this segments votes. A Democratic flanker brand that was liberal on economic issues yet center-right on key hot-button social issues, would give these voters what they actually want. And as any marketer will tell you, giving the customer what they want is a really powerful thing.

The main problem with introducing a new flanker brand is that it would harm party unity. But that problem could be managed by educating all concerned about the core principles we all have in common, and that Republicans do not share.

This issue is as old as political parties themselves. But changes such as the new media landscape suggest that we need to approach it in new ways.

Aaron Ahuvia, Ph.D., is a professor of marketing at the University of Michigan-Dearborn and is one of the worlds leading experts on the psychology of brand love and on the psychology of happiness. He was ranked 22 in the world for research impact in consumer behavior.

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Democrats need a flanker brand | TheHill - The Hill