Political Effects of the expanded Child Tax Credit

Since its launch in July, Fighting Chance for Families Action, a project of Data for Progress and Groundwork Collaborative, has tracked the political feedback effects of the monthly expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC). Our initial analysis found that CTC recipients were slightly more likely to approve of President Biden. This initial analysis provided preliminary evidence that the CTC confers some political advantage to the implementing party, in this case, the Democrats.

In this memo, we attempt to expand on this initial research. Our goal is to take a deeper look to identify what kind of political impact the CTC had if any.

To examine this, we built upon our previous analysis by using a two-stage estimation procedure. The basic idea is that we fit a model for Biden support using data only from polls taken shortly before the first CTC checks were sent. This establishes a baseline approval level based on demographic and partisan characteristics. In the second stage, we fit a model on polls taken after the introduction of the first checks, which uses the model score from the first stage as a feature along with the other effects we are interested in estimating.