Top 10 Bipartisan Issues

Identifying our issue is the first in our four-step process for helping commonsense legislation pass Congress. Once we’ve picked our issue, we’ll take the second step of developing a full policy brief on it. CommonSense American staff will work with relevant experts in the coming months to make the strongest case for and against each of the most promising proposal under the chosen topic.

For the third step, you’ll review the brief and indicate whether you support or oppose each proposal described.

In our fourth step, we’ll engage Congress with the results indicating where there is broad support and where there isn’t. For example, we conducted over 50 congressional briefings last year on our Electoral Count Reform Act results, briefings which played a major role in its passage.

We develop the Top 10 list in six steps:

1. The White House—We start in January each year by asking the White House for a list of promising bipartisan issues.
2. Congress—We then begin meeting with senior congressional staff, typically the Chief of Staff and/or Legislative Director for a given Member of Congress (MOC). We focus particularly, though not exclusively, on the offices of those MOCs who have a strong track record of bipartisanship. Since Democrats control the Senate, we met with more Democratic than Republican Senate offices. Since Republicans control the House, we met with more Republican than Democratic House offices.
3. Free Response—We start congressional meetings by asking them which issues they believe are the best combination of meaningful and achievable.
4. Reactions to the Emerging CommonSense American List—In each meeting, after the staff members have nominated the issues they believe are most promising, we share our current draft list of issues. In the first congressional meeting, we share the list from the White House. In subsequent meetings, the list includes additional issues frequently nominated in previous congressional meetings. We ask them to give each issue one of three ratings: (1) Yes, they agree it’s promising, (2) Maybe, meaning passing something meaningful in that issue area is possible but more difficult, or (3) No, it’s unlikely that something meaningful could be signed into law this year.
5. Coding Congressional Responses—Any issue that congressional staff nominate as promising in the free response (not in reaction to our draft list) is coded as a “1.” Issues rated as a “Yes” in response to our list are coded as a “0.5”. Issues rated as a “Maybe” are coded as a “0”. Issues rated as a “No” get a “-1.” We continually calculate the weighted average rating of each issue as we proceed through our congressional meetings. Those ratings determine the rank order of the draft list we present in subsequent meetings. To calculate the weighted average rating, we first calculate the average Republican and the average Democratic rating. Then, we take the average of those two averages to be sure that we are weighting Republican and Democratic responses equally.
6. Congressional Rank Order—Once we’ve completed our last congressional meeting, we email a link to the congressional staff with our final Top 10 list in rank order according to the weighted average described above. We ask them each to re-order the list from most to least promising in their view so that the rank order we give you is as accurate as we can make it. The final rank order is similarly weighted. We calculate the average Democratic and the average Republican ranking and then take the average of those two. That results in the “Average Congressional Rank” which determines the rank order in the list below.