This essay was originally published in Elliot’s Substack, The Family Frontier.

2026 has been the year of Very Important Polls when it comes to family policy. We’ve had, among others, New America’s New Practice Lab demonstrating why time is such a vital missing element of the policy discussion; Capita’s Quarterly Insights from America’s Families providing a comprehensive look at how much precarity and stress our parents are under; and, specifically regarding the care pillar of family policy, NA’s Better Life Lab showing the deep misunderstandings but hopeful intuitions of the American public around child care and home care for seniors. Then last week, the respected scholars Joan C. Williams and Jared Abbott released a striking new report undergirded by polls of 5,800 voters: “The Left’s Coalition Crisis: Understanding the Massive Divide Between Working Class and College Educated Voters, and How to Bridge It.” Their findings have tremendous—I daresay massive—implications for family policy and the care movements therein.

First, some background: Williams and Abbott, back in March, pointed out that working-class voters who are disaffected and disillusioned by both political parties are simply checking out of politics altogether—”disengagement, not conversion,” as they put it. This finding has been echoed by other researchers as well.  That is to say, Trump’s 2024 victory was powered in large part by working-class voters, and while many of those are now turning away from the Republicans, they are not suddenly changing their voter registration letter to D. For instance:

Most wavering Trump voters are not becoming Democrats—they are disengaging from politics entirely. Of the 20.1 percent who are wavering, only 3.4 percent plan to vote Democrat. The remaining 16.7 percent say they will vote for neither party or are unsure.

This is the pattern that should alarm anyone who assumes that defection from Trump automatically signals support for Democrats: a large bloc of young, low-income, non-white working-class voters who tried the political system, found it wanting on both sides, and are now preparing to check out. These are not people moving left. They are people losing faith that politics can deliver for them at all.

And, as they note in the new report, it’s exceedingly difficult to build a durable electoral coalition without substantial numbers of working-class voters. Beyond simply winning overall majorities in Congress or the Electoral College, I’d add that working-class voters are key to getting anywhere near the 60 Senate votes needed to break the filibuster on major social policy that can’t be enacted via budget reconciliation.

(By the way, working-class voters, per Williams and Abbott’s definition, are individuals who make between $40,000 and $100,000 a year and do not have a college degree—a description that encompasses roughly 50% of voters. They give a characteristic example of a mechanic married to a bookkeeper. One could quibble with this definition in either direction—for instance, I don’t think a liberal who grew up in a working-class or even low-income household but went on to get a college degree and now makes over $100,000 is necessarily the same as a liberal who comes from generational wealth—so let’s stipulate both that the authors are painting with broad category brushes and that doing so does not invalidate their conclusions.)

While framed with a partisan grammar, this story is far more consequential than even who wins a particular election. Americans who no longer see themselves represented in either major political party and who therefore back away entirely from the small-d democratic enterprise is a real societal danger. That way lies anomie, disconnection, a breakdown in the ties that bind and any sense that we owe one another anything at all.

So what do working-class voters respond to?

I want to quote so, so many parts of this 100-page report for you. But I’m going to try and distill what I find to be the most important observations. Before we get to the care-specific findings, some general conclusions I think are important to highlight:

While economic issues are a high priority for college-educated liberals, they focus chiefly on costs. Working-class people do, too, but they also focus on the other side of the “affordability” equation: jobs, wages, and working conditions. There’s a potentially powerful cross-class coalition in the making around economics: the precarity that has long infected working-class life is increasing for younger college grads—and AI will only make things worse.

And, regarding community:

In sharp contrast to elites’ globalism, non-elites tend to be intensely rooted in the communities they grew up in: 68% of white noncollege voters (who were predominantly Trump voters) live within a two-hour drive of where they grew up. While elites expect their children to grow up and fly away (preferably to pursue a high-status and/or lucrative career), non-elites typically expect their children to remain in their networks even as adults.

Non-elites’ place loyalty reflects the higher value they place on community and solidarity, as documented both in social psychology and ethnographies. Traditionally, this reflected blue-collar workplaces where safety depends on colleagues. “We’ve got to watch out for each other first,” said a miner. Rural residents, too, are more likely to value community—indeed, many would have moved away to pursue better economic opportunities if they didn’t feel a strong sense of place loyalty.

Place loyalty also reflects that non-elites tend to get jobs through their small, dense “clique” networks. That’s also how they handle childcare, elder care, and help with fixing the roof. In other words, non-elites use their local clique networks to protect themselves from the rigors of a market that would otherwise consign them to poor-quality childcare, eldercare, and roof repair.

If you’re like me, you might be having a bit of reaction to the contrast of working-class voters with “elites,” as if those of us with graduate degrees who have moved around a lot don’t have any pride in place or automatically look down on the “common people.” I don’t think that’s the accusation Williams and Abbott are leveling, but I do think it’s important to acknowledge that descriptively, there are substantial differences in play that track along lines of class I remember one particularly stark moment of realizing how much of a bubble I live in during the odious 2016 “Access Hollywood” Trump tape episode. I assumed the reaction from all but the most hardcore GOP supporters would be universal revulsion. It… was not.:

A key finding of this report is that college-educated liberals live in a class bubble where virtually everyone agrees with them on culture and climate issues—but working-class people don’t. This makes it very difficult for liberal college grads to see that their views reflect a particular class position, and that people who are situated elsewhere in the class hierarchy will typically hold different positions on issues that college-educated liberals care about deeply. The key to getting outside elites’ bubble is data.

Enough preamble. Let’s talk about care!

First off, Williams and Abbott show that the ol’ talking point about childcare being something only liberal elites care about is simply wrong—but liberal elites and working-class voters do take a different angle of approach:

Childcare is a high priority both for liberal college grads and working-class respondents: it’s liberal college grads’ 7th highest priority and working-class people’s 11th (out of 30). Class gaps on care economy issues average 17 points, the second lowest mean we observed for any issue. Super-majorities of both groups support care economy policies: about two-thirds of working-class people and over 80% of liberal college grads.

When Williams and Abbott tested different ‘reframes,’ the issue that saw the single greatest jump in support from working-class voters was, in fact, child care.

The key is that working-class voters resonated with childcare most when it was presented as connected to work ethic and responsibility—in other words, child care as an enabling condition to provide for their families.

Now, they didn’t exactly go message test all ten Raising a Nation cases, but I’d argue what they did test hits strong notes of the “Family Values” case, draws some from the “Anti-Poverty Case,” and sidles up to the “Economic Case.” But note, on that last one, that the message isn’t about childcare powering a strong economy or making American business more competitive: it’s about parents keeping their employment so they can maintain their family’s financial stability. And, as I state numerous times in the book, the question isn’t whether this particular framing is your or my favorite: the question is what persuades the people we need to persuade.

This data also reminds me of the finding Brigid Schulte and I had in the BLL poll that most people don’t actually know what in the world “universal childcare” means:

It’s also clear, yet again, that we have to move in a direction of pluralism when it comes to care policies. I’ve written quite a bit about the child care “preference gap,” but it’s worth sitting with how the lack of real child care options that meet families’ needs translates for working-class households:

The traditional breadwinner-homemaker family often looks good to families who today need two jobs to get by. In a society without adequate childcare, that often means “tag teaming,” where mom works one shift, dad works a different shift, and each parent cares for the family while the other is at work. The price is right, but the cost is high: tag-team families have three to six times the national divorce rate.

It’s not just child care, either:

The same pattern emerged for child tax credits, though less dramatically. The standard liberal framing—emphasizing child-poverty reduction—drew 73% working-class support. Reframing the policy as helping hardworking parents pay for childcare so they can keep their jobs lifted working-class support to 79%. This reframing also raised liberal college-grad support by 6 points—another reminder that class-competent reframing typically does not trade off against elite support.

The point in all of this is that if we want to win the family policies we think the country needs to enable widespread child and adult flourishing, we have to meet people where they’re at. That means understanding how one in two voters in this country think about care issues Or, at least, the many ways they think about care issues, since working-class voters are no more a monolith than any other demographic group. and putting into place an agenda in which they can see themselves. In some ways, this report helps solve the mystery of why childcare is working as a campaign issue despite relatively few voters actually having young children: it throws into sharp relief the very idea that one should be able to work hard, play by the rules, and get ahead in this country.

It also hammers home why a laundry list of programs—more subsidy here, another job training program there—does not meet the moment, because “economic realities are mediated by identity, and it is suggestive of the power of people’s sense of social status to shape their economic and political decisions.” Working-class voters, by and large, are proud, hard-working people rooted in place and a sense of dignity: they want a fair shot, good soil in which to watch their family sprout. I am reminded, too, of former FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya’s powerful essay from last year in which he opined, “If you focus on the conflict between left and right, if the most important thing is what you are—your party, your state, your race, your ethnicity—the people I met could not be more different. On the one hand, you have rural, white small-business owners, generations into building a life in this country. On the other, you have urban Latino, Haitian, African, and South Asian immigrants, every one of them a worker. The line between them is sharp, almost tribal. What could they possibly have in common? Everything—if you look at what they need. The people I met as a commissioner may look different, but what they need is surprisingly the same: They need a government that gives them a level playing field against the powerful and wealthy. They need the courts to check corporations when they abuse that power and wealth. They need basic dignity and control in their material lives.” Going from 1 in 9 eligible families getting a child care subsidy to 1 in 7 is a hollow victory. Cultivating good-paying jobs with reasonable working conditions and predictable schedules, and using public funds to get the boot of crushing healthcare costs off parents’ necks while guaranteeing they can choose the care situation that is best for them and lets them support their family is an entirely different type of agenda; in the connective tissue lies the outline of a national family policy.

The good news is that now we know it’s a winning agenda, too.

Elliot Haspel is a Senior Fellow at Capita.