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Framing theory also suggests that the term facilitates alliances between these groups, and helps them appeal to a broader cohort of contiguous groups and bystanders. The frame builds a bridge between patent and copyright, perhaps permitting copyright industries to draft off of the arguments that the pharmaceutical industry makes about the importance of exclusive rights to innovation. Similarly, it may permit patent-based industries to benefit from arguments about piracy and the breakdown of law that copyright owners make. (Of course, each member of this newly framed group is also rendered vulnerable to the attacks made on their new allies.) The importance of collective-action frames for industry actors is particularly apparent in the international realm. The TRIPS agreement is widely attributed to the efforts of a very small number of industry leaders in the United States who came together to articulate a common interest and persuade the legislative and executive branches that IP protection was crucial to the balance of trade in the United States. 201 But as analysts of the process have shown, the alliance itself was not a foregone conclusion; industry groups had to create a new trade committee in order to create a common agenda that would unite Hollywood producers, publishing interests, the software sector, industrial manufacturers, and the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. Participants initially understood themselves as “strange bedfellows” and had significant disagreements about strategy.203 Part of how they united and gained the support of policymakers was by forging a common identity as intellectual property industries, and by framing the use of their products without permission as “theft.”204 The industry lobby was “particularly effective in translating their private interests into a matter of public interest,” for example by “packag[ing] its demands as a solution to America’s trade woes” and “appeal[ing] to America’s long-standing free trade ethos.” 205 It made the case that TRIPS was not only good for American business, but also good for global innovation, and for developing countries specifically.206 Although there were undoubtedly many factors that worked to produce the acquiescence of developing countries,207 those who have studied it have concluded that the success of TRIPS required not just pressure and transfer payments, but also interventions in the realm of ideas.208

U.S. Trademark law provides Big Tech with legal tools to vigorously protect their brands and goodwill. Big Tech takes advantage of these legal tools through aggressive and intimidating pre-litigation and litigation tactics, oftentimes, to the detriment of their competitors. Since trademarks can last in perpetuity8 and relatively few constraints are imposed on trademark owners, Big Tech can vigorously enforce its trademarks against alleged infringers indefinitely. This allows Big Tech to provide an extra layer of everlasting protection to Big Tech “boxes” of information within its relevant market.9 Thus, Big Tech uses trademarks as a weapon to create resilient “boxes” that enclose society. Although the Subcommittee referenced Google’s use of trademark law to prohibit trademarked terms from being used in Google ads,22 there is no indication that trademark issues were the Subcommittee’s focus. Thus, this paper uses the Subcommittee Investigation to explore how Big Tech utilizes trademark law and legal strategies to ruthlessly exploit favorable market conditions and maintain market dominance. 1998, Google launched as a general online search engine23 and has since become the “largest provider of digital advertising, a leading web browser, a dominant mobile operating system, and a major provider of digital mapping, email, cloud computing and voice assistance services.”24 Historically, Google has maintained market dominance by strategically acquiring successful tech companies in competing fields.25 Google is currently the default search provider on 87% of desktop browsers and the majority of mobile devices, thereby dominating the world online search engine market with 87% of U.S. searches and over 92% of searches worldwide.26 By acquiring competing tech companies and establishing itself as the default search engine for most devices, Google has successfully hindered free competition. According to the Subcommittee findings, “[n]o new general search entrant over the last decade has ever accounted for more than 1% of all U.S. searches in any given year,” which provides sufficient evidence of Google’s durable monopoly power. 27 Google’s monopoly power has led to consumer deception and an apparent decrease in quality of Google’s products and services, including Google search results.28 For example, Google’s AdWords, originally launched in 2000 to allow advertisers to pay for “keyword-based ads” to appear alongside Google Search results, has become a tool that Google uses to undermine competition and exploit its monopoly of general online search.29 AdWords users’ bid for the privilege of paying Google an exorbitant amount of money in the hopes that their content might be shown among the top searches in the Google search engine. Over the years, Google has increased the number of ads appearing along with organic search results and has displayed ads and organic results in an inconsistent manner.30 These changes have allowed Google to “extort businesses” to pay higher prices to be able to access. Because Apple installs iOS on all Apple mobile devices and does not allow other mobile device manufacturers to license iOS, Apple controls software distributions on iOS devices.36 Apple’s gatekeeper power over software distribution on iOS devices allows Apple to maintain significant power in the market for mobile operating systems and mobile app stores.37. he foundations of trademark law help Big Tech continue to protect their brands and goodwill among consumers. Trademark law regulates brand names that populate the marketplace, including Google, Apple, and Facebook.55 U.S. Trademark law provides protection to both registered and unregistered marks56 and was developed to (1) incentivize producers to invest in quality; (2) reduce transaction costs, such as consumer search costs, and (3) promote free competition in business and trade.57 A trademark can be “any word, name, symbol, or device, or any combination thereof […] used by a person […] to identify and distinguish his or her goods, including a unique product, from those manufactures or sold by others and indicate the source of the goods, even if that source is unknown. In recent years, Big Tech has engaged in anticompetitive practices that prevent smaller tech companies from entering the market altogether.80 The USPTO has stated in a recent study that a trademark “troll” or “bully” uses its rights to “harass or intimidate other businesses beyond the scope of what that law is reasonably interpreted to permit.”81 Big Tech has “bullied” smaller tech companies by alleging intellectual property theft, blocking. small tech companies from platforms, and essentially driving smaller tech companies out of business.82 Big Tech trademark infringement suits demonstrate how Big Tech manage to prevail (or obtain settlements) in trademark cases simply because they have more resources and money to file meritless or frivolous suits.83 Because smaller and medium sized companies often have less resources and money available to defend against trademark infringement claims (meritless or not), these competitors are bullied by Big Tech to either (1) leave the market or (2) pay Big Tech licensing fees to use their trademark. As competitors become disincentivized from entering the market, Big Tech is further insulated from competition. This insulation emboldens Big Tech to raise its prices for U.S. consumers while also decreasing the quality of the goods or services provided. Thus, even though trademark law is supposed to incentivize consistent levels of quality for trademarked products and services, Big Tech’s exploitative conduct of trademark law effectively allows the opposite to happen. This misleads consumers because they are left with the perception that Big Tech goods (or services) are the highest quality, simply because Big Tech has no other competition that produces products or services of similar or higher quality.

For over a decade, the nation’s highest court has sowed doubt about whether inventions in certain high-tech industries — ranging from medical diagnostics to finance — are eligible for patent protections. Without that certainty, investors naturally assume the worst and avoid those sectors. As recently retired federal judges who regularly presided over patent disputes, we witnessed the mounting confusion firsthand. Lower courts have tried, and often failed, to make sense of the confused case law. Fortunately, there is an easy solution. Congress could pass a bipartisan bill, the Patent Eligibility Restoration Act, to restore predictability and thereby spur investment and job creation. The root cause of today’s troubles is a pair of Supreme Court decisions, in 2012 and in 2014. In Mayo, the court ruled that a diagnostic test was ineligible for patent protection because it relied on measuring unpatentable “laws of nature.” In Alice, the justices held that a particular strategy used by a bank for automatically mitigating risk was an “abstract idea” ineligible for patenting. The core defect in these rulings is the justices’ reliance on subjective concepts like “abstractness” and “laws of nature” to determine patent eligibility. This injects tremendous ambiguity into the eligibility analysis, and makes it hard to predict which inventions will be deemed eligible and thus patentable if meeting other requirements of the Patent Act. In the aftermath of these rulings, patent eligibility challenges have skyrocketed. In the year following the Alice decision, the Federal Circuit invalidated patents in cases it heard. Yet when issued, these patents were valid. Fields like medical diagnostics and gene therapies face a crisis of patentability, jeopardizing progress on pressing health issues. One study estimated that in the wake of Mayo, venture capital investment in medical diagnostic technologies was lower than it otherwise would have been. In our former court, which hears patent cases on appeal, concurring and dissenting opinions have proliferated. Veteran jurists have the state of affairs as “incoherent,” “unclear,” “fraught,” and “inconsistent.” Some defenders of the new status quo have denied there is a problem at all. One even suggested that “under one of the most well-established metrics for measuring the predictability in the law, Section 101 proved to be more predictable than other areas of patent law over the past decade.” That is, lower court decisions, usually of ineligibility, were rarely overturned on appeal. But that is unsurprising because of the ambiguity of the law. The study is also misleading. While it may be true that expert lawyers can predict the likely outcome of Section 101 disputes — which generally involve finished products that have already been brought to market — startup companies are not making research and investment decisions based on finished products. They, and their investors, are making those decisions based on the reliability of intellectual property protections for inventions that are so early-stage, they often exist only on paper. If there is any doubt about whether those inventions can be protected, entrepreneurs and investors will inevitably err on the side of caution — and direct their resources to other sectors. Fortunately, a ready solution exists. The bipartisan would effectively overturn Mayo and Alice, restoring Congress’ patent statute. Under PERA, pure mathematical formulas, natural phenomena and basic mental processes would remain ineligible for patent protection because they fell outside the four categories Congress enacted. But novel, useful inventions derivedfrom these building blocks would become eligible again. For instance, metabolic processes would remain unpatentable — but a diagnostic testing company that found a novel way to detect a metabolic disorder could patent its test, assuming the invention met all other requirements of patentability. This would give investors the certainty and objectivity needed to continue funding cutting-edge research with the potential to change, or even save, lives. The U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property recently held a hearing on PERA, where lawmakers were able to ask questions and hear from a number of leading patent law experts. The former directors of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office under both Presidents Trump and Obama testified in favor of the bill. and we hope the full committee will move swiftly to hold a markup of it. Judges try their best to apply the Supreme Court’s precedents in good faith. But the inherent ambiguity of decisions like Alice and Mayo put lower courts into an impossible position — and the costs to innovation and the economy continue to mount. Congress can end the damage by passing PERA without delay.

WASHINGTON—American voters have deep-seated concerns about the power wielded by big technology companies and want the federal government to take a stronger stand in regulating them, according to a new poll. The poll conducted for the privately funded Future of Tech Commission found that 80% of registered voters—83% of Democrats and 78% of Republicans—agreed the federal government “needs to do everything it can to curb the influence of big tech companies that have grown too powerful and now use our data to reach too far into our lives.”

Silicon Valley giants like Google, Meta, and Amazon are typically thought of as ruthless competitors, but now they’re acting in unison against a common threat.

With bipartisan support swelling for increased antitrust regulation against tech’s biggest players, tech-funded advocacy groups have spent at least $36 million this year on TV and internet ads opposing any new legislation, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal. With the greatest messaging platforms ever created at their fingertips, you’d think Silicon Valley would find a cheaper way to voice their opinions.

Washington, D.C. — The U.S. Chamber of Commerce today released a new national poll conducted by AXIS Research. The poll found that 70% of voters oppose Congressional proposals to add new antitrust regulations for technology companies, and a majority of voters are more likely to oppose candidates who support such regulations.

Upon hearing descriptions of the proposed policies in the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, 79% of Republicans, 72% of Independents, and 59% of Democrats say they strongly oppose or somewhat oppose the bill which would impact services they rely on.

Democrats stood by Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair as she weathered hours of questioning before the House Judiciary Committee, during which Republicans called her a “bully” whose tenure at the antitrust agency had been “a disaster.”

Republicans hammered Khan for allegedly mismanaging the agency and its resources, misleading Congress, launching politically motivated antitrust action and withholding requested information from the committee.

One early lesson for Democrats from Election Night results in Senate races: Money isn't everything.

In Kentucky, Amy McGrath vastly outraised incumbent Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell. Jamie Harrison did the same thing to Sen. Lindsey Graham in South Carolina. As did Barbara Bollier in Kansas, who raked in far more cash than GOP nominee Roger Marshall.

[(J. Miles, associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, the University of Virginia Center for Politics’ authoritative, nonpartisan newsletter on American campaigns and elections.) “How Current Presidential Polling May Impact House Races”, Center For Politics, July 11th 2024, https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/how-current-presidential-polling-may-impact-house-races/]//LR

For context, though Republicans currently hold a narrow majority in the House, 224 districts on the 2024 map would have backed Biden in 2020, while Trump would have claimed 211. Using the 2020 results as a baseline for a uniform swing, Table 1 considers two scenarios. The first scenario features a tied national popular vote. Before the debate, Biden was running about even with Trump in FiveThirtyEight’s national poll aggregator. This is the rosier of the two scenarios for Biden, as it assumes he can recover the ground he’s lost since the debate. For this, each district swings about 4.6 percentage points to Trump (a number commensurate with Biden’s actual 2020 two-party popular vote margin). With a tied popular vote, we could expect 10 Biden 2020 seats to flip to Trump, with four more districts being within a few tenths of a point of doing so. Of course, in reality, things likely wouldn’t be as tidy, as some districts would shift more than the national swing while some would see less pronounced, or even leftward, shifts. Considering their marginal nature, it isn’t too surprising that, in terms of their current representation, these 10 hypothetical Biden-to-Trump seats are currently evenly divided between the parties. With the exception of CA-40, where Rep. Young Kim (R) holds a seat that is typically redder than what its presidential topline may suggest, all the GOP-held seats that flip in this scenario are hosting races that the Crystal Ball rates as competitive (we are defining that term to encompass seats that we rate as either Toss-up or Leans Democratic/Republican). First-term Rep. Tom Kean (R, NJ-7) would hold the closest Trump-won seat. As we mentioned last month in our Virginia primary preview, if Biden slips only a few points in our state, we could easily see the Virginia Beach-area VA-2 flipping to Trump, as it does in this case. In Arizona, GOP Reps. Dave Schweikert (R, AZ-1) and Juan Ciscomani (R, AZ-6) both won with less than 51% of the vote in 2022 but would also find themselves in Trump seats. Democrats, meanwhile, would be defending a pair of open, Trump-won seats in Michigan: the adjacent pair of Districts 7 and 8—the former covers the area around Lansing while the latter includes Flint. Two other Democratic-held Great Lakes state seats in this category are OH-13 (Akron) and PA-7 (the Lehigh Valley). While these seats could get tougher for their Democratic incumbents—who both have some of their own strengths—the concurrent Senate races could work in their favor. Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Bob Casey (D-PA) will almost certainly run better than Biden in their respective states, and they seem likely to at least carry those types of marginal seats. Finally, in North Carolina, first-term Rep. Don Davis (D, NC-1) was given a tougher seat when the state adopted a new GOP-drawn map last year. In 2022, Davis won his seat (which was bluer than the version he is running in now) by close to 5 points while NC-1’s result in the concurrent Senate race was about even. So a 2.9-point Trump win in his district would not be insurmountable for Davis, although he may not be as well-positioned to outperform the top of the ticket in counties that are newer to him.

Spending is a vital part of U.S. elections, with the 2012 Congressional elections alone involving over $3.5 billion. With so much money involved a natural question that often comes up is how does this spending affect election results. The traditional way this question has been posed has involved the amount of money spent by each candidate but not where that money came from. Many candidates like to boast that they are running a grassroots campaign, with the implication being that they have the support of the people and therefore can expect to perform better in the election. If this is true then the source of campaign contributions could be an important factor. Because corporations do not have a vote, only contributions from individuals will represent votes during the election. Of course the fraction of voters who contribute to a candidate is relatively small and thus the actual vote share represented by donors may not have a significant effect on the election. However, the actions of donors should be reflective of the actions of voters as well. In this paper I examine whether the source of campaign contributions plays a role in determining the effect those contributions have on election results. I find that individual contributions have a greater impact than corporate contributions because they represent both money and votes whereas corporate contributions represent only money. I show that there are in fact two separate effects that occur related to campaign contributions. The first effect is the direct spending effects that is a result of increased spending leading to higher vote shares. However, there is also an indirect effect that is contained in individual contributions which involves the relationship between campaign contributions and candidate quality. In order to show why the source of a contribution would make a difference, I first propose a theoretical framework in which candidates of differing quality compete in an election. I show that unlike corporate contributions, individual contributions are a reflection of a candidate’s quality. Because candidates who are higher quality will attract more contributions, the very fact that a candidate receives a contribution is a reflection of that candidate being of higher quality and thus that candidate should be expected to perform better in the election. This means that individual contributions will lead to a direct spending effect as well as an indirect quality effect whereas corporate contributions will only lead to the direct spending effects. Therefore we should expect individual contributions to be more closely related to a candidate’s electoral success. I then attempt to test this theory using congressional election data from the past 30 years. Empirical estimation of election results is always complicated by problems of endogeneity, particularly with incumbent spending. If an incumbent is in a safe race they will tend to not spend as much as if they were in a close race, leading to an apparently negative relationship. This is a result of incumbent spending and election results being simultaneously determined which leads to biased estimates of the effect of incumbent spending. This is a well documented problem that unfortunately does not have an easy solution. I therefore proceed in two directions. I first look for evidence that the source of campaign contributions is indeed an important factor. I then attempt to estimate the effects of campaign contributions using three stage least squares to overcome the simultaneity problem. I find that individual contributions do have a significantly larger effect on election results than corporate contributions. I further show that this is very likely a result of a close relationship between individual contributions and candidate quality. I attempt to control for this relationship by including the number of individual donations made to each candidate. Even after controlling for the amount of contributions made to each candidate, the number of donations is highly significant, suggesting that the number of supporters a candidate has will in part predict how well the candidate will do in the election. This new measure gives a way of controlling for candidate quality in a way that is driven by the actions of voters.

“The main reason that business PACs donate is probably to get access to important members of Congress, which is why PAC contributions go overwhelmingly to incumbents,” Andrew Mayersohn said in an email to The Markup. Mayersohn, a researcher at the Center for Responsive Politics, which maintains OpenSecrets, a public database of campaign contributions, said that because elections have gotten so expensive, even the maximum PAC contribution—usually around $10,000 an election cycle—is only a tiny fraction of the amount that a competitive campaign requires. “I doubt that companies are under the illusion that their donation will swing an election,” he wrote.

Milwaukee — Amid the pomp and partying at the Republican National Convention, one development is adding to the air of triumphalism in Milwaukee: A slew of major tech players have turned their political and financial support to former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party, signaling a possible realignment in support from traditionally liberal Silicon Valley.

It began with reports at the beginning of the week that Elon Musk had pledged $45 million a month for at least the next three months to Trump's election effort. This was reinforced by the selection of Ohio Sen. JD Vance, a former venture capitalist who has nurtured close relationships with right-leaning or libertarian tech leaders in Silicon Valley, as Trump's running mate. By Tuesday, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, co-founders of a high-flying venture capital firm, had endorsed Trump on their podcast and said they would kick in financially to support the former president.

If you read the headlines this week about Elon Musk, David Sacks, Marc Andreessen and other influential figures in technology moving to support former President Trump’s re-election, it appeared a sea change had taken place in Silicon Valley, long considered a Democrat hotbed.

The loudest donors in Silicon Valley are promoting Trump at a time when the tech world as a whole is ascending in Washington, with billionaires using their ballooning wealth and media foothold to exert influence. Their voices are made all the more prominent amid the conspicuous neutrality of Big Tech leaders like the Google C.E.O. Sundar Pichai and the Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg, who are possibly afraid of invoking Trump’s ire and employee backlash.

It began with reports at the beginning of the week that Elon Musk had pledged $45 million a month for at least the next three months to Trump's election effort. This was reinforced by the selection of Ohio Sen. JD Vance, a former venture capitalist who has nurtured close relationships with right-leaning or libertarian tech leaders in Silicon Valley, as Trump's running mate. By Tuesday, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, co-founders of a high-flying venture capital firm, had endorsed Trump on their podcast and said they would kick in financially to support the former president. It's an adage in American politics that "money follows money," so many expect the influx of contributions from Musk and the other tech moguls to generate a lot more cash for Republicans in the coming weeks. Those at the vanguard of this trend are taking full advantage of the momentum. Venture capitalist David Sacks, a past supporter of Democrat Hillary Clinton and relatively early adopter of the Trump tech money machine, is urging his comrades to get off the sidelines and give to the Republican nominee. He took to X this week with a social media post that listed the growing number of Trump contributors, including Musk, Andreessen Horowitz, Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of the data mining company, Palantir, and Doug Leone, the billionaire venture capitalist and major tech investor, who have all given to Trump. "Come on in, the water's warm," Sacks wrote. An angel investor in major companies like SpaceX, Uber and Palantir, Sacks believes Trump has a much larger base of support in Silicon Valley than is readily apparent but that those who back him are afraid to admit it publicly in a place where the prevailing politics have been overwhelmingly liberal. Still, he says his fellow techies are gaining the courage of their convictions and senses an inflection point. "I think what we're seeing is that each incremental endorsement makes the next one more likely," Sacks told CBS News in an email. "Now the dominoes are falling quite quickly." How significant this Silicon shift is — and how lasting it will be — is a matter of debate. Some of those who closely track campaign finance say it's a bit too early to tell. Moreover, there's no sign yet that most of the dominant tech platforms, like Meta, Google or Apple, or their leaders, are moving into the Trump camp. "This isn't about Big Tech players who have traditionally leaned Democratic switching sides," said Anna Massoglia of OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan watchdog group that keeps tabs on political donations. "Instead, we're seeing an anti-establishment conservative faction starting to become more politically active," Massoglia added, cautioning that there is not enough data yet to know whether this represents a sea change or just a temporary shift. Either way, campaign finance experts say the amount of money moving to Trump is significant and could have a material effect in this election cycle. If Elon Musk follows through on his pledge $45 million per month pledge, he'd immediately catapult into the ranks of the top five or 10 donors of the past few elections, including mega-donors like George Soros, who backs Democrats, and Miriam Adelson and her late husband Sheldon, who has bankrolled Trump the tune of more than $200 million. Musk and many of his fellow tech titans who have opened up the spigot for Trump are backing Trump for the first time. Some have supported Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden in 2020. "What's new here is the emergence of a group of people who were not previously committed now spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to elect Republicans and certainly trying to get Donald Trump elected," says Saurav Ghosh, director of federal campaign finance reform at the Campaign Legal Center. But why is this shift happening in the first place? There are different theories. To the Trump campaign, the shift is the result of its candidate's pro-business agenda. "In the tech sector we've seen this surge of support as fundamentally driven by President Trump's pro-business vision, reducing regulatory burdens and producing an economic environment in which American innovation can thrive," said Brian Hughes, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign.

Six years later, Casey is facing a very different dynamic with his former Senate colleague and current vice president, his party’s likely nominee for president. Casey has shared a deep personal relationship with President Joe Biden that dates back to the 1980s when his father, the late Bob Casey Sr., was this state’s governor. They grew up, albeit two decades apart, on the same North Washington Avenue, and Biden was quick to embrace Casey when he decided in 2005 to run for the Senate. When Casey defeated Republican incumbent Rick Santorum the next year, Biden pressed Senate leadership to give Casey prestigious committee assignments, and in return, Casey was first out of the gate to endorse Biden for president in April 2019. Casey was with Biden on Election Day in Scranton in November 2020 when he convinced the soon-to-be president to stop by to say hello to his mother, Ellen. And Casey even stood by Biden after his disastrous debate last month. Casey, like his party, has moved significantly more left of center since 2004 — an ideological place he never occupied before he won his Senate seat. In fact, in 2004, after he won an overwhelming successful race for state treasurer, he told the local press that his party’s loss to incumbent Republican President George W. Bush was “a total repudiation of the national party; if our national campaign for president can’t attract rural Democrats, we’re never going to win,” he said. Casey blamed the national party for allowing “the Hollywood crowd and the entertainment crowd to speak for Democrats in a hate speech way that really, really angers voters in both parties.”

In 2006, when running for Senate, he told the Harrisburg Patriot-News “All I know is I’ve been a pro-life Democrat for my whole public life, and I’ll always be.” Twenty years later, Casey will inevitably have to answer to voters for several things in his bid for an unprecedented fourth term: How does he square his worldview with Harris’s on issues such as her pledge to end all fracking if she is elected president, her insistence she would not treat illegal entrants to this country as criminals, her belief that there are too many police officers on the streets, and her support of Biden’s economic policies that a majority of voters reject in polling? Keystone College political science professor Jeff Brauer said there is a lot to untangle for Casey. Making that task more urgent, his opponent, Republican Army veteran Dave McCormick, has released a devastating ad pointing out those challenges. “Critics of Vice President Harris’s bid for the presidency will repeatedly point to her stances on critical issues such as energy and fracking, immigration and the border, and the economy and inflation,” Brauer said, adding, “These three issues are particularly important to Pennsylvania voters.” Brauer explains Casey’s support of Harris’s candidacy will automatically put him on defense, “which is never a good place for a candidate to be. With Harris at the top of the ticket, it will make Casey’s reelection more difficult, especially with voters outside of the metropolitan areas of the state.”

President Biden’s decision to drop his reelection bid and Vice President Harris’s emergence as the front-runner for the Democratic nomination has vulnerable Senate Democrats scrambling to fend off new GOP attacks on her record. Biden’s biggest vulnerability was his age and doubts about his fitness for office, but the silver lining for Democrats was that Biden’s biggest problems were confined to him as a candidate and did not substantially impact Democratic senators downballot, according to polls. But now incumbents such as Sens. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Bob Casey (D-Pa.) and Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) are being pressed on Harris’s most controversial policy statements, stretching back to the 2020 Democratic primary. Democratic senators had worried that lack of voter enthusiasm for Biden would hurt Democratic turnout in Senate battleground states. Democrats don’t know for sure whether Harris as their nominee for president will drive minority and young voters to the polls in significantly higher numbers than Biden would have in November. But they are generally optimistic about her having an energizing effect on the party, pointing out that she raised $81 million during her first 24 hours as a candidate after Biden dropped out of the race. The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) circulated a memo to Senate Republican campaigns Monday highlighting controversial elements in Harris’s record, ranging from immigration and border policy, to “Medicare for All” and opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline and fracking. Jason Thielman, executive director of the NRSC, wrote in a memo to campaigns that Harris “creates a strong down-ballot opportunity for Republicans.” “An endorsement of Kamala Harris is an endorsement of her extreme agenda, and Harris is arguably a bigger threat to Democrats’ Senate majority than Joe Biden,” he wrote. Of the Democratic incumbents in tough races, Brown, Casey, Rosen and Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) have endorsed Harris for president. Only Tester hadn’t endorsed Harris as of Monday afternoon. Tester last week called on Biden not to seek reelection and voiced his support for an open nomination process. Senate Republicans, however, pointed out that Tester encouraged Harris to run for the Senate in 2015, when he was chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC). Senate Republicans strategists are zeroing in on Harris’s vice presidential record as a “border czar.” They are highlighting Harris’s opposition while in the Senate to the Trump-era health order known as Title 42, which was used to block migrants from entering the country, and her suggestion that Immigration and Customs Enforcement should be rebuilt “from scratch.”

Senate Republicans say Harris’s opposition to fracking will be an issue in the Pennsylvania Senate race, where Casey is running comfortably ahead of his Republican opponent, David McCormick. They are also highlighting her past support of the Green New Deal touted by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), her praise of a $150 million cut in police funding in Los Angeles and her call to “reimagine” the role of police. Tommy Garcia, a spokesperson for the DSCC, said the shake-up atop the Democratic ticket won’t substantially impact Senate races where Republicans are “stuck” with “flawed” candidates. “Senate Republicans are in meltdown mode because they are still stuck with the same flawed recruits and toxic agenda that have left them trailing Senate Democrats all cycle long. Senate races are candidate vs. candidate battles, and we’ll win because we have the far superior candidates,” Garcia said. Other Democrats say that while Republicans are trying to attack Harris’s statements and positions from 2019 and 2020, when she was running in a crowded primary for the Democratic nomination, she can run on her more moderate record as a member of the Biden administration. “She’s been in the mainstream of the Democratic Party. When she was attorney general in California, progressives criticized her for being a cop. When she ran for Senate, they said she wasn’t liberal enough. When she ran for president, progressives weren’t really with her,” said Jim Kessler, executive vice president for policy at Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank. “What she has is a now three-and-a-half-year record as vice president in which she can talk about helping to bring down crime, murder rates plummeting, border crossings dropping like a stone, an economy that is the envy of the free world,” he said. “That’s the case she can make. That’s the case she’ll have to make.” Some Democratic senators, however, in recent weeks were reluctant to join the push to boot Biden from the ticket because of the unpredictable impact downballot. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) stopped short of endorsing Harris on Monday but said he would meet with her soon. “She is rapidly picking up support from grassroots delegates from one end of the country to the other. We look forward to meeting in person with Vice President Harris shortly as we collectively work to unify the Democratic Party and the country,” he said in a statement with House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.).

Republicans say Harris has many of the same vulnerabilities that Biden had, apart from questions about age. Immigration was already a key part of the GOP battle plan, and the potential for Harris at the top of the ticket led to many news releases like one from Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, which said likely Democratic rival Debbie Mucarsel-Powell “endorsed Border Czar Kamala Harris’ open borders agenda that has led to the worst border crisis in American history.” On Monday, Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, who leads the House Republican Conference, said she will introduce a resolution to condemn Harris’ role as Biden’s “border czar” adding that she “and every elected Democrat owns this border crisis.” A review by FactCheck.org found that Harris never held the title of “border czar.” She was appointed by Biden in 2021 to lead an effort to “improve security, governance, human rights, and economic conditions” in Central America named the “Root Causes Strategy.” The strategy consisted of several actions intended to “address the root causes of migration” specifically from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, FactCheck reported. Rep. Richard Hudson, the chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, said the change at the top of the ticket doesn’t make a difference in Republican messaging. Harris would also be a drag on down-ballot races, he said. “Republicans are on the ascendency because the voters have decided that Biden-Harris policies have made them less safe and less prosperous, and so nothing’s changed,” he said.

‘San Francisco radical’ The National Republican Senatorial Committee released a memo Monday laying out arguments GOP candidates can use to attack “San Francisco radical Kamala Harris.” Those critiques include portraying the former prosecutor as a soft-on-crime liberal, by dredging up old interviews of her calling for an end to the filibuster to pass the Green New Deal and her 2019 call for single-payer health care coverage to replace private insurance. The memo also pokes fun of Harris’ “habit of laughing at inappropriate moments” and desire to ban plastic straws. “Kamala Harris creates a strong down-ballot opportunity for Republicans. The case against Joe Biden relied in part on the fact that he was mentally unfit to hold office, which was difficult to translate down-ballot. Kamala Harris owns the Biden Administration’s baggage and is an avowed radical. An endorsement of Kamala Harris is an endorsement of her extreme agenda, and Harris is arguably a bigger threat to Democrats’ Senate majority than Joe Biden,’’ read the memo drafted by Jason Thielman, the NRSC’s executive director. GOP campaign strategists say they will also be combing through Harris’ record when she ran for president in 2020. “The DCCC just signaled to their candidates to embrace every extreme San Francisco liberal policy that Kamala Harris endorsed,’’ said Will Reinert, spokesman for the NRCC, referring to his counterpart Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Whether that’s banning fracking in Pennsylvania, supporting the Kenosha rioters in Wisconsin or decriminalizing border crossings in California. It’s political suicide, and we are happy to allow Democrats to dig their own political grave.”

If Republicans win one of those states — West Virginia is a near-lock after the retirement of Democratic-turned-independent Sen. Joe Manchin — and the presidency, they will capture control of the Senate. But Republicans' gains could go beyond those three, and Daines believes polls currently understate Republican candidates' chances. “The Trump voters are many of our lower-propensity voters. And they show up to vote when Trump’s on the ballot, and they don't show up in midterms,” Daines said. “And they also don't show up in polling data very well.” Daines’ team analyzed the last 69 Senate races that took place in presidential years, and in all but one contest, he said, “whichever party won the presidential [election] in that state, their party also won the Senate race.” The only exception: Maine in 2020, when now-President Joe Biden won the state while voters also reelected GOP Sen. Susan Collins.

In addition to those three Trump states, Democrats are also defending seats in a number of Electoral College battlegrounds — Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — that could tip with the top of the ticket. A  out Monday in Pennsylvania showed Trump leading Biden there by 3 points, but Democratic Sen. Bob Casey was ahead of the GOP nominee, businessperson Dave McCormick, by 8 points.

Since the debate, Donald Trump has taken a strong lead in nationwide and . Although Senate Democrats are performing better than Republicans in individual toss-up state senate polls, the GOP is poised to reclaim the U.S. Senate in November. Currently, the Senate is controlled by Democrats, with 51 Democrats and 49 Republicans. However, with the retirement of Sen. Joe Manchin from West Virginia, Republicans are likely to gain an edge. West Virginia’s Senate seat is expected to go to Republican candidate Jim Justice, given  in the state in 2020. The  shows that Republicans are likely to secure at least 50 seats, while Democrats are guaranteed 43. The other seven Senate toss-up states – Arizona, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – are all currently held by Democrats. If Republicans win just one of these seats, they will gain a majority in the Senate.

The only poll examining all these states since the first presidential debate is from Remington Research (R), conducted June 29-July 1. It shows that most toss-up Senate seats lean towards Democrats, but Republicans have opportunities to gain a few. Unsurprisingly, the most likely seat for Republicans to gain is in Montana, which . This year’s Senate race is between Democratic Sen. Jon Tester, who’s served in the seat since 2007, and Tim Sheehy, a former Navy SEAL and founder of Bridger Aerospace, an aerial firefighting and aerospace company valued at around $140 million. The poll shows Sheehy leading Tester by 5 points, 50% to 45%. The poll shows the Arizona and Wisconsin Senate races currently tied at 47% and 48% respectively. In Arizona, the race is between Republican Kari Lake, who lost the 2022 Arizona governor’s race, and Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, who has served Arizona’s third district since 2023. Previous polls indicated Gallego was ahead, with the current  having him 2 points ahead of Lake. In Wisconsin, Republican entrepreneur Eric Hovde is challenging incumbent Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin. Another Wisconsin poll from , conducted June 28-July 2 with 600 likely voters, shows Baldwin leading Hovde by 5 points.

In this year’s battle for the Senate, like so many cycles before, we have the same competing forces: The election fundamentals favor Republicans, while candidate quality appears to favor Democrats, who currently hold a narrow majority in the chamber. For now, though, it appears even flawed Republican candidates likely won’t be able to stop their side from winning Senate control. Democrats face two “M” problems: the math and the map. Let’s start with the math. Republicans need a net gain of one seat to win the Senate if wins the presidency (with his vice president casting any tie-breaking votes). They need a net gain of two seats for a majority regardless of who wins the presidential election. Republicans have a lot of options to net those one or two seats. Senate Democrats (including independents who caucus with them) hold 23 seats up for election this year; Republicans hold 11. This brings us to the map. Eight of the 23 Democratic seats up for election this year are in states either where Trump won or where he is up by at least 5 points in . Five of them are in states where Trump holds at least a 5-point advantage. Three are in states where Trump won by at least 8 points and where the incumbent senator is the only Democrat in nonjudicial statewide office. One of those three is West Virginia, where Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin is retiring. Trump won the state by 39 points in 2020, and every respectable nonpartisan handicapping outlet views the seat as a safe Republican pickup. There are only two Republican Senate seats being targeted by Democrats – and , which Trump carried by single digits in 2020. But the GOP incumbents in both states currently lead their Democratic opponents by double digits. Every other Republican-held Senate seat on the ballot this year is in a state where GOP presidential candidates have dominated since .