Most Americans think government programs would be more helpful for families generally than for their family in particular, but they rate housing, food, and healthcare programs consistently higher than others.
One of the consistent aims of the American Family Survey has been to better understand policy — both what people support and also what policies benefit their own personal situations. And we note at the outset of this brief description of how people perceive family policy that those two factors are not the same. One asks for a global assessment, and one asks the respondent to consider their own personal family — a self-assessment.
Here, we look at the overall percentage of respondents who say a program is “very” helpful. Setting the standard a bit higher than simply “somewhat helpful” is a bit of a hedge against people simply thinking a program would probably do some good. By focusing on people who respond a program is “very” helpful, we aim to get a better picture of just how much people think it would help families generally or their personal situation. By and large, the numbers are not terribly far apart — though it is clear that people think programs would be more helpful generally than in their specific, personal case.
A few particular policies stand out: affordable housing (the most popular), free or reduced-cost health care for kids, expanded mental health access, and preschool access for young children are the policies with the widest gaps between what would help a person’s specific case and what people tend to see as good for society.
Still, even though there is a gap, those programs tend to be the most popular whether we make the question general or specific. (In fact, the correlation between responses to the general and specific questions is above 0.8, suggesting that the public’s views on these questions are relatively tightly connected.)
Are the programs consistently popular? Given the political nature of these programs, it is worth investigating potential partisan divides.
The results disaggregated by partisanship reveal just how much less sympathetic to these programs Republicans tend to be (note: we have reported the percentage for families overall here, though the graphic is not wildly different if it is reported for specific families). In some ways, this graphic might make Republicans it appear less sympathetic to these programs than they actually are. Setting the level at “very helpful” pushes Republicans against the programs,and if we report the percentage for any “helpful” response, Republicans go up quite a bit. For instance, affordable housing is “very helpful” in the eyes of 32% of Republicans, but it is “helpful” in the eyes of 71% of Republicans. Other questions make similar jumps.
Still, even with the focus on the “very helpful” policies, Democrats simply are much more positive about all of these programs, and they are consequently much more likely to support the programs. Republicans do not believe that the programs are unhelpful, but they are far less likely to rate them at the high end of the “helpfulness” scale.
But what about the people these programs are designed to assist? What do they think? We can explore this by focusing on parents who make less than $40,000 per year.
Here, we report the question regarding one’s personal circumstances. The most popular programs tend to be child tax credits, tax credits for low-income families, expanded mental health care, an increased minimum wage, and affordable housing. But the pattern is essentially that while a few are rated somewhat higher (and things like college, student loan forgiveness and trade schools are all rated somewhat lower), among those who are the targets of this aid, about half (or just a bit lower than half ) would find any of the programs very helpful.
Stepping back from the specific numbers, are there big-picture lessons here? We see a few.
First, while we make no claim that these programs are efficient or clearly worth the tax expenditures, the public broadly favors most of these programs and believes that they help people. Some things help less. People are less enamored with things like private school vouchers or student loan assistance, but they are fans of almost everything else. Indeed, if we loosened our standards slightly, supermajorities of both political parties would respond that these programs are at least helpful much of the time.
On a related note, it is worth noting that the public does prioritize certain things over others: housing, food, and health care all score quite high among the policies we asked Americans to rate. Things like paid family leave, preschool access, and the minimum wage are in a middle-ground area where they are fairly popular but not quite as respected as the basic services. Then a few things — private school vouchers and student loan forgiveness, for instance — are just not as helpful in the eyes of the public. They are not worthless or wildly unpopular ideas. Perhaps they are worth doing in some circumstances, but they are not what the public sees as the bread and butter of family assistance.
Finally, relatively poor families favor any kind of help. This is probably in part because money is fungible. If it is hard to pay for health care, it is probably also hard to pay for housing. Money spent on schooling cannot also go to groceries, and so forth. While policymakers should obviously be wise about which programs would make the most difference, we think the testimony of the low-income families here should be taken seriously. When they say these programs would be very helpful to them, it is probably because they would most of the time. In our view, a time of increasingly difficult budgets requires lawmakers who will choose between these programs and prioritize the people who need help the most. But it is clear the public wants significant government support for some of their fellow Americans.
By Christopher F. Karpowitz and Jeremy C. Pope
METHODOLOGY NOTE
Between August 22-29, 2024, YouGov interviewed 3,245 respondents who were then matched down to a sample of 3,000 to produce the final dataset. The respondents were matched to a sampling frame on gender, age, race, and education. The matched cases were weighted to the sampling frame using propensity scores. The matched cases and the frame were combined, and a logistic regression was estimated for inclusion in the frame. The weights were then post-stratified on 2020 presidential vote choice as well as a four-way stratification of gender, age (4 categories), race (4 categories), and education (4 categories), to produce the final weight. The overall margin of error is +/- 2%.