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Republican and Democratic voters are divided on many of President Joe Biden’s economic policy proposals, but making child care more affordable is one rare area of common ground.
Biden’s $1.8 trillion American Families Plan calls for a $225 billion investment in making child care more affordable and providing free universal preschool education for three and four-year-old children.
Many Republican voters are on board with at least some of those ideas. Some 78% of Republican voters say they want subsidized child care programs for working families where the typical family would pay around $45 a week, depending on their income, according to December 2020 polling conducted by First Five Years Fund (FFYF), a nonprofit that advocates for affordable early education.
An even higher share of Democratic voters (93%) support that scenario for subsidized child care, according to the poll.
A solid majority (79%) of Republican voters said they support tax credits to help working families pay for child care, and 63% said they want their member of Congress to work with Biden on child-care issues.
Almost the same exact shares of Republican and Democratic voters (73% and 95%, respectively) want universal pre-K programs that would function like public K-12 schools whereby the programs would bear no additional cost to child care providers.
Despite the bipartisan support among voters, Republican lawmakers are unlikely to get on board with Biden’s plan, which calls for increasing income and capital gains tax rates on wealthier Americans to pay for it.
But Republican lawmakers have supported expanding funding for child care in the recent past. Late last year, 47 Republican lawmakers sent letters to their colleagues supporting funding increases for early education and child-care programs in the federal budget, and the Senate ultimately proposed increases for several of those programs.
The letters stopped short of advocating for universal Pre-K programs, despite its growing bipartisan support during the pandemic.
Child care, and the lack of affordable options in the U.S., has become a defining issue during the pandemic as many working parents, especially women, have been challenged to balance raising children while earning a living.
Women ages 25-44 were almost three times as likely as men to not be working due to child-care demands, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey. In some cases, moms were working extra hours to compensate for the lost wages of other working-age adults in the household.
To enable more women to return to the workforce, affordable, quality child-care programs will be key, said FFYF executive director Sarah Rittling.
“There’s no question that America’s economic recovery from this pandemic and our long-term success as a nation will depend on a child care system that works for all families who need it,” she said.
