When JD Vance and Tim Walz compete in the vice presidential debate Tuesday, it could be one of the final chances for voters to learn more about how a potential Republican White House would approach an issue central to many of them: child care. 

With Election Day less than six weeks away, Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris has offered a plan to cap child care expenses at 7 percent of a household’s income, though her plan is short on details about how it would be implemented and paid for. Republican former President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has proffered no child care plan at all, and when asked at a recent economic forum, said that “child care is child care,” before going on at length about tariffs and taxing foreign nations. 

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Voters from both parties overwhelmingly want the candidates to have a plan to help families secure high-quality, lower-cost child care. With the first and likely only presidential debate in the rearview mirror, that sets up Tuesday as potentially the last formal chance for moderators to press Vance, in particular, about how a second Trump administration would handle issues like child care that have a disproportionate impact on women.

Plus, Vance and Walz will take the stage the day after a second tranche of COVID-19 stimulus money earmarked to stabilize the child care system expires. After the first expiration date last September, the share of parents without access to child care increased from 17.8 percent to 23.1 percent, a National Women’s Law Center analysis of Census data showed. 

Voters continue to say that the economy and other personal economic issues such as cost of living and wages are top of mind as early voting begins in some states. When The 19th and SurveyMonkey surveyed the electorate earlier this month, the issue most important to women was inflation and the cost of living, followed by health care, abortion and “jobs, employment and wages.” 

Trump has enjoyed an advantage over Harris on the economy but polling shows his edge is winnowing. The former president chose Vance as his running mate in part due to the credibility the junior senator from Ohio and father of three might bring to issues affecting families, which are often economic. Since joining the ticket in July, however, Vance’s recent and past statements on families, women and children have drawn mostly negative attention — his comments on “childless cat ladies,” in particular.

The Republican Party, meanwhile, is grappling with its declining popularity among women voters in the buildup to the first presidential election in more than 50 years without a federal right to legal abortion, which experts say is also an economic issue. Women make up a majority of the electorate and vote at higher rates than men. Trump has nevertheless spent little to no time discussing economic issues that impact women with any specificity. Harris, meanwhile, has made issues like caregiving and paid leave central to the pillars of her economic plan. 

Child care, for example, is an economic issue that disproportionately affects women’s ability to fully participate in the workforce. Headed into the COVID-19 pandemic, research showed that women still shouldered the overwhelming majority of child care responsibilities, spending 40 percent more time watching their children than fathers in heterosexual couples in which the parents were married and working full time. 

“There’s not enough child care for the number of children who need it,” said Melissa Boteach, who studies income security and child care at the National Women’s Law Center Action Fund. “Now what you’re seeing is parents — and especially mothers — are oftentimes having to make choices that are not really choices.”

“Do I step back from the labor force because I can’t afford child care or because it costs more than what I’m earning? Or do I take a job that is not the job that I want, because it’s more flexible, even though I’m making less? Or do I put my kids somewhere I don’t love … but it’s the only thing I can find? Those are not great choices,” she added. 

Even with child care funding in President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 pandemic-era stimulus package known as the American Rescue Plan, nearly 16,000 child care facilities and home-based day cares closed between December 2019 and March 2021. Waiting lists for child care became so long that mothers quit their jobs and women considered not having children. When WaitlistPlus, a software provider that manages waiting lists for child care centers, analyzed data for The 19th, it found that the average length of a list had ballooned 28 percent between February 2020 and February 2023. 

Trump’s campaign did not respond to a request to discuss their policies related to child care, paid family leave and other issues that would impact women’s economic status. That leaves Vance’s past statements as the best available indicator of how the Trump-Vance White House might approach handling them.

The Harris campaign knows that Trump and Vance both have vulnerabilities with women voters: The former president has yet to present key policies that would directly impact their lives; his running mate talks about those issues in ways that have the potential to alienate them. Walz, a governor of Minnesota and former member of the House of Representatives, has already shown ease talking about issues like parenting and reproductive health care that are both personal and economic. He will likely come to the debate prepared to discuss Harris’ policies — but also present his own family’s experiences.

Vance has spent just a year-and-a-half in the Senate, and none of the legislation he has introduced has become law, or even received a vote. But some of his Senate work, paired with his answers on issues like child care, in the absence of a campaign platform that addresses it, hint at how a Trump-Vance White House might approach issues with a specific economic impact on women. 

The day before Trump addressed the Economic Club of New York and suggested that tariffs could drive down child care costs, for example, Vance told conservative activist and commentator Charlie Kirk that the cost of “day care” could be lowered by having grandparents or aunts and uncles “help out a little bit more” and that the country could “empower working families” by reducing regulation and education requirements in the child care industry. His remarks were highly publicized. The next day, in a post on the social media site X, Vance added that he believes government policies penalize families who use friend, family and neighbor (FFN) child care over formal child care in licensed settings and that he predicts Harris’ plan to subsidize child care costs without increasing supply would drive down quality. 

Vance’s opinions about responsibility for child rearing and subsidizing child care were established before he joined Trump’s campaign. In 2020, for example, Vance agreed with podcast host Eric Weinstein, a managing director at the venture capital firm of Paypal founder Peter Thiel, a conservative mega donor who pumped $15 million into Vance’s Senate campaign, that the “whole purpose of the postmenopausal female” is caring for grandchildren. As Congress in 2021 negotiated Biden’s infrastructure package and caregiving elements were mostly stripped out, he wrote on X that “‘Universal child care’ is a massive subsidy to the lifestyle preferences of the affluent over the preferences of the middle and working class.’” He added: “‘Universal day care’ is class war against normal people.” 

The United States spends just 0.2 percent of its gross domestic product on child care for infants and young children — far less than is average in the developed world. Headed into the COVID-19 pandemic, over half of Americans lived in what was considered a “child care desert,” with rural, Latinx and lower-income households most affected. The American Rescue Plan, on which Harris cast the deciding vote, included $24 billion for child care stabilization grants and $15 billion in supplemental funding for the preexisting Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) block grant program. The stabilization grant expired last year; the supplemental block grant funds expire at the end of this month.

The Office of Child Care within the Department of Health and Human Services estimates that child care funding in the stimulus bill stabilized 200,000 child care providers, benefitted 10 million children and increased the compensation of 710,000 child care workers — 94 percent of child care workers are women. A National Women’s Law Center study out this week examined how the two child care funding pools helped nearly all states expand access to child care and boosted the wages of workers while also reducing burnout. 

Subsidies for the type of friend, family and neighbor child care that Vance favors are already available via the Child Care and Development Fund. When Biden tried to enact what would have been a historic, multi-trillion-dollar investment in human infrastructure like caregiving and paid leave, though, it did require all child care providers to be licensed to qualify for additional subsidies, while the vast majority of FFN providers are unlicensed. That effort was stymied by Republican opposition and two Democratic holdouts in the Senate who later left the party. 

Vance has provided no additional details about how he would approach lowering the cost of child care for families using FFN care or licensed child care facilities, other than continuing to emphasize family-provided care, usually suggesting it be provided by women. He has not signed on to multiple pieces of proposed bipartisan legislation in the Senate aimed at reducing child care costs for American families. Harris has spoken at length about how growing up, a neighbor cared for her and her sister while their mother worked. Her campaign did not respond to a query about if her child care plan would support or otherwise impact FFN care. 

The United States is also just one of seven countries without national paid family leave for new parents, another issue that has disproportionate impacts on women and their ability to participate in the workforce. Trump has said Republicans worked on the issue to no avail during his first presidency, but his party has repeatedly blocked Democratic efforts to enact paid family leave. Vance introduced one Senate bill related to postpartum leave that would prohibit employers from clawing back the health insurance premiums they pay while a new parent is on leave if the parent does not return to the workforce. It is designed to incentivize stay-at-home parenting. 

Vance also left a bipartisan group of senators working on a bill to reduce the cost of giving birth when he became Trump’s running mate. 

Though the Harris-Walz campaign has not yet announced what its paid leave policy would be, when Harris ran for president in 2019, she proposed six months of paid family and medical leave at the federal level — it was one of the most ambitious leave policies a Democrat has ever put forward. 

One policy related to the economic wellbeing of families and the ability of women to participate in the workforce on which Vance has offered a hard figure: an expanded child child tax credit. He wants to increase this tax benefit by about 150 percent to $5,000 per child. He has not said how he would pay for it, which could be a complication even within his own party, given that Republicans are often focused on reducing government spending levels, not increasing them. Trump has not weighed in on Vance’s plan to further expand the child tax credit. He touts that during his presidency, he “doubled the child tax credit” to $2,000, but research shows that it was structured in a way that benefitted wealthier families more than low- or middle-income families. This expanded credit expires in 2025. 

Harris, in an economic speech earlier this week outlining policies she released in early September, suggested a new child tax credit during a baby’s first year worth up to $6,000 for low- and middle-income families to “cover everything from car seats to cribs.” She has also proposed expanding the existing child tax credit to as much as $3,600 from $2,000. These proposals were likewise offered without details about how her administration would pay for them — the proposed expansion of the existing child tax credit alone is estimated to cost more than $1.2 trillion over 10 years, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

When Vance floated his expanded child tax credit on CBS’ Face the Nation in mid August it was less than two weeks after Republicans voted down a more modest bill in the Senate because they said, among other things, it might disincentivize work. 

Vance did not vote for, or against, it. He has missed every Senate vote since joining Trump’s White House ticket in mid July.

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