LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — They call Social Security the "third rail" of American politics.
It's a metaphor drawn from electric subway systems— where the third rail is charged with electricity. Touch it and you get electrocuted.
It's also a very common attack, usually from Democrats against Republicans.
In an attack ad, Democratic U.S. Sen. Jacky Rosen says her Republican opponent, Sam Brown, wants to eliminate Social Security and Medicare, two programs intensely popular with inveterate senior-citizen voters.
"Sam Brown embraced sunsetting [ending] Medicare and Social Security," says the ad.
Sam Brown publicly supported forcing massive cuts to Social Security and Medicare, and was caught on tape saying he admires the plan to phase out Social Security and Medicare entirely in five years.
The ad springs in part from a plan first proposed by Florida Republican U.S. Sen. Rick Scott in 2022, when Scott was the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the campaign organization charged with getting members of the GOP elected to the upper house.
Scott's 11-point plan included, among other things, a provision to end federal spending legislation every five years, unless Congress votes to reauthorize it.
The Scott plan was controversial at the time; even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., came out against it. (McConnell later defeated Scott, who mounted an intraparty challenge for the majority leader's office.)
But Brown, who was running for U.S. Senate in the Republican primary against former Nevada attorney general Adam Laxalt at the time, had kind things to say about the Scott plan.
According to PolitiFact, Brown told the Spring Mountain Republican Women's club he admired Scott for formulating a plan, rather than just saying no to Democratic ideas.
"I think I appreciate that he is trying to look forward, he is trying to cast a positive vision," Brown said, according to leaked audio of the event.
One of the things, I think, that some of the Republican Party leaders have failed at is we have become labeled — and sometimes we do this to ourselves — is we become the party of 'No. Oh, no, we're not going to do that.’ We're the party of just rejecting policy instead of the party of projecting ideas. What Rick Scott has done, attempting to create a road map for a better America, is something that I admire as well.
Brown never said anything specifically about Social Security or Medicare, or other details of the Scott plan. But because those two programs count as "federal legislation," and because Scott made no exceptions in his initial plan, Democrats jumped on Brown for ostensibly embracing the eventual expiration of both programs.
(Notably, Scott in 2023 amended his idea to specifically exclude Social Security and Medicare.)
"What I thought was interesting in Sam Brown's case is he did not, as the ad suggests, say this sounds like a great idea," said PolitiFact Editor-in-Chief Katie Sanders. "He said he admired Rick Scott's energy to produce such an idea. He was being very delicate and he never said he endorsed sunsetting Medicare and Social Security."
Brown did, however, embrace ideas such as one from U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., to cut just 1 percent of federal spending, or another from then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., to balance the federal budget. Both of those ideas would result in cuts to federal spending, and the cuts grow even larger if Social Security or Medicare are excluded, PolitiFact found.
But Brown's campaign told the fact-checking website that he does not support cuts to either Social Security or Medicare. Given Nevada's senior population (at least 17 percent of residents here are older than 65, according to the census bureau) that's understandable.
"We've seen politicians, not just Jacky Rosen, use this line of attack again and again and again," Sanders said. (To be sure, Rosen deployed the same hit against then U.S. Sen. Dean Heller in 2018, when she defeated him to win her first term in the Senate.) "Politicians have a tradition of shading the truth, to present their agenda in the most palatable terms to voters. A lot of what they do on the regular is just omit important context or lead with what could be true but then leave out a lot of the rest of the story."
But couldn't Rosen's campaign argue that, given that the Rick Scott plan initially made no exception for Social Security or Medicare, that Brown's supportive comments at least plausibly seemed to embrace cuts to the program?
"He didn't embrace the idea for sunsetting every federal program," Sanders said. "He embraced the chutzpah, the drive. And so I think that they [Rosen campaign] saw some positivity there around a plan that is seen as pretty toxic and they ran with that for the ad. That is very deceptive, but not something that the Rosen campaign has done in isolation. Others have done this across the country."
As a result, PolitiFact has rated the Rosen ad "mostly false." (Her overall record shows half her ads are "half-true," a third are "mostly false" and 16 percent "true." Rosen has no "false" or "pants on fire" ratings.
Brown's campaign, by contrast, has 33 percent ads rated "mostly false" and 66 percent rated "false," with no "true," "mostly true" or "pants on fire." But Rosen's campaign has seen twice as many ads checked by PolitiFact, six, as opposed to three for Brown.
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