Democrats are very sympathetic to government assistance, but far less willing to admit the positive benefits of marriage and two-parent homes for society.
A longtime theme of the American Family Survey has been a focus on policies proposed to help families. Some are popular, some are not. This year, as we look back on a decade’s worth of data, we look at what policies each party is most likely to support or oppose. While we note common ground, both parties seem to approach family policy with certain blinders and biases prominently displayed.
Our discussion of Republicans can be found here.
The survey finds that while there is very little support for the government encouraging people to have more children, every other proposal ranges from near majority support to super-majority support. While there are key partisan differences, promoting marriage is popular (in contrast to encouraging kids).
Democrats have different blind spots and biases than do Republicans, however. Their reluctance hinges on an unwillingness to promote marriage and two-parent families as important concepts. Both self-identified liberal Democrats and moderate Democrats fail to reach majority support for “encouraging two-parent homes for children” and encouraging “marriage” more generally. These differences are instructive. Among those on the political left, moderates are more willing to support marriage and family as are Democrats who are married.
However, the impact of ideology and family status pales in comparison to the key differentiator among Democrats: church attendance. Among those who attend church at least once or twice a month, 66% favor encouraging twoparent homes and 61% favor encouraging marriage (non-attenders clearly oppose such actions). Admittedly, the fraction of Democrats who attend church this often is not enormous — 27% in our data, as opposed to the 58% of Democrats who seldom or never attend church — but it does represent over a quarter of the party, and the support for encouraging families is strong among this group.
Parties — and this is true of both major ones in the U.S. — are not monolithic coalitions, no matter how much they may appear to be such (and even though we often lump people together under the label “Democrat” or “Republican”). There is clear variation among Democrats on what they are willing to support and promote. The idea that rhetorical encouragement of bourgeois values is unwise or even oppressive may be current among a certain set of Democrats, but it is not true of the whole party. And if the party — even the liberal wing of it — is to achieve its goals, it is likely to need to find ways to support families rhetorically.
The Democratic Party has several ideas for future programs and policies to help families. Some of them essentially recall the increased child tax credits during the COVID pandemic, but others involve much larger amounts of “social infrastructure,” as Eric Klinenberg puts it. And as seen above, Democrats are very sympathetic to the idea of promoting programs to help families. Their reluctance has more to do thinking that promoting a particular version of family can be seen as oppressive.
Democrats are being short-sighted about the infrastructure that traditional families produce. Family scholars like Melissa Kearney, for example, have shown that two-parent families produce a host of benefits, including reduced inequality, better average educational outcomes for children, and a clear hedge against poverty and all of its attendant ills. Liberal Democrats are clearly reluctant to support a certain version of support for parents, but this reluctance misses an important piece of the infrastructure that helps families and children.
For instance, when we asked about the most important problems for families, 26% of respondents said singleparent homes were a major problem for families. But 57%of this group was Republican, while only 25% identified as Democrats. Lots of Republicans are willing to offer rhetorical support for traditional family structures, but Democrats are reluctant. Still, that 25%is important, especially as soon as one considers the politics of family.
The problem facing pro-family policymakers is that enthusiasm for policy to help families is clearly divided across the parties, and the goal of helping families will require a coalition that brings together moderates and church-going partisans to help families in a full-spectrum fashion. What would this full-spectrum support for families entail? Not merely a commitment to programs and spending, but also a willingness to provide rhetorical and public support for the idea of two-parent families and the benefits that such families bring to help children flourish.
To arrive at this full-spectrum support for families will require not just marshaling the support of liberal Democrats but finding ways to put together moderate Democrats and moderate Republicans together into a broad-based coalition. The American constitutional system requires large majorities in favor of a policy that persist over time. Without that kind of broad-based and consistent support, policies languish. The 25% of the public that both thinks two-parent families are important and are also self-identifying Democrats is critical. Without their support, and perhaps the support of other moderate and church-going Democrats that can be won over, the idea of full-spectrum support for families will likely wither on the vine. This is not merely an opinion about politics; it is the pattern that exists for any policy.
Building a coalition requires sacrifice. People are required to admit that their preferred ideal option may not be what produces the coalition necessary for real change. Helping families — by whatever means — will require that Democrats make sacrifices to join that broad-based coalition. The path to a full-spectrum coalition that both rhetorically and substantively supports families lies — at least in part — through the moderate and church-going Democrats (and Republicans) that show up in our American Family Survey data.
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%.