Voters Support Investments in the Care Economy
By Ethan Winter and Evangel Penumaka
Last week, President Joe Biden released the American Jobs Plan (AJP). This plan called for significant investments in America’s caregiving infrastructure, job creation and increased wages, and benefits for essential home care workers. In the same announcement, President Biden also announced the following package after AJP, the American Families Plan, to provide even more investments in the care economy.
In an April 2021 survey of likely voters nationally, Invest in America and Data for Progress sought to measure the attitudes of likely voters regarding these planned investments in the care economy. We find high levels of support for these investments, with likely voters reporting that they see care as a critical part of recovering from the pandemic.
First, we tested whether likely voters would support investments in the care economy in general. We find that they do by a 52-percentage-point margin (71 support, 19 oppose). Notably, we find support for this extends across partisan lines: likely voters that self-identify as Democrats, independents, and Republicans back it by margins of 83-points, 42-points, and 26-points, respectively.
We also tested support for the following individual components that may be included in the final legislation: specifically, access to affordable child care, access to affordable care for seniors and people with disabilities, ensuring care workers are paid living wages, creating good-paying new jobs for care providers, and ensuring all workers have access to paid family and medical leave. Likely voters overwhelmingly support each of the proposed investments. Affordable care for seniors and those with disabilities is supported by a 65-point margin. Living wages for care workers, paid family and medical leave, affordable child care, and creating new care provider jobs are all supported by margins larger than 50-points.
Next, we asked likely voters if they would support investments in the care economy to assist with the recovery from the pandemic or if they think now isn’t the time for additional spending. We find that by a 28-point margin, likely voters think that we should make investments in caregiving when asked under this framing.
Last, we asked a question to get at the ideological underpinnings of debates around investments in the care economy. Specifically, we posed to likely voters whether they think caregiving is a responsibility of both individuals and the government or solely the domain of individuals. We find that by a 26-point margin, likely voters agree that caregiving is both an individual and social responsibility that the federal government should be doing more to support. Democrats and Independents both think that caregiving is an individual and social responsibility by a margin of 65-points and 17-points. Republicans are divided: Thirty-eight percent think caregiving is both an individual and social responsibility and 50 percent think it is solely an individual responsibility.
Broadly, our polling finds that in addition to physical infrastructure investments, likely voters support prioritizing our caregivers, and ensuring that workers have access to affordable childcare, affordable long term care, paid leave, and liveable wages.
Toplines to this polling can be found here.
Authorship and Methodology
Evangel Penumaka (@evangelpenumaka) is an analyst at Data for Progress
Ethan Winter (@EthanBWinter) is a senior analyst at Data for Progress. You can email him at ethan@dataforprogress.org
From April 2 to April 5, 2021, Invest in America and Data for Progress conducted a survey of 1,209 likely voters nationally using web-panel respondents. The sample was weighted to be representative of likely voters by age, gender, education, race, and voting history. The survey was conducted in English. The margin of error is ±3 percentage points.