With Tim Walz, Kamala Harris May Give Families A Lifeline

When Vice President Kamala Harris delivered her first rally speech after announcing her campaign for president last month, she outlined some of her priorities for “building up the middle class,” including making childcare more affordable and implementing a national paid leave policy. To advocates invested in improving the lives of family caregivers, and particularly women, it was a signal that Harris is committed to following through on some of the Biden administration’s unmet promises.

Those advocates see Harris’s choice of Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, along with her pledges to bolster social programs and implement paid leave policy, as reaffirming her commitment to strengthening the “care economy” as president.

“With the selection of Governor Walz, [Vice President] Harris is doubling down on caregiving as a top priority,” said Melissa Boteach, the vice president of childcare and income security at the National Women’s Law Center Action Fund.

This is largely because of Walz’s experience in Minnesota: He and the Democratic-controlled state legislature undertook an ambitious agenda in 2023, approving a slew of progressive policies including an expanded state child tax credit, a new paid family and medical leave program, universal school meals, and additional protections for abortion access. Despite their razor-thin majority, state Democrats embraced those ideas, which would be considered moon shots in a divided legislature.

The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, this year rated Minnesota as the fifth-highest-scoring state for its annual care policy report card, in part because of the paid family and medical leave program that will go into effect in 2026, with its expansive eligibility standards and guarantee of 12 weeks of 90 percent pay for workers.

“You don’t win elections to bank political capital,” Walz wrote last year about his governing strategy. “You win elections to burn political capital and improve lives.”

That mentality forms part of the rationale for why Harris chose Walz as her running mate. It also indicates an interest by Harris in returning to unfinished business from the Biden administration—namely, the Build Back Better agenda, President Joe Biden’s massive social policy proposal that died in the Senate in 2022. The Build Back Better Act included universal prekindergarten, free community college, and 12 weeks of paid family leave. Much of what the Minnesota state legislature approved in 2023 was based on what could not be passed on the federal level in 2022.

Indeed, Minnesota’s state child tax credit was inspired in part by the federal credit implemented by the 2021 American Rescue Plan, Democrats’ massive coronavirus relief legislation. That credit expired at the beginning of 2022, although the Build Back Better Act would have reimplemented it. Like the expanded federal child tax credit, the Minnesota credit is refundable, meaning that it is accessible to families too poor to pay income taxes. The result could be an ouroboros of campaign talking points: With the help of a Democratic Congress, Harris and Walz would want to implement a federal expanded child tax credit, as Walz did in Minnesota, which was modeled after the federal expanded child tax credit.

Unlike other contenders for Harris’s running mate, Walz does not represent a crucial swing state like Pennsylvania or Arizona. Still, it’s possible that his support for populist economic policies could appeal to independent and swing voters, and particularly women. Suburban women especially have proved to be crucial voting blocs in recent years, particularly after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. An NPR News/Marist College poll released this week found that Harris was narrowly leading former President Donald Trump, an increase fueled in part by support from white women with college degrees and independent women.

But some Republicans have argued that focusing on aspects of the care economy is misdirected when Americans are concerned about inflation and rising costs at the grocery store. “[Democrats] can talk about the ‘care economy,’ but people are worried about the real economy every single day,” GOP Senator Kevin Cramer told reporters last week.

Advocates point to the high costs of childcare and disability care as being just as crucial to families as the price of milk, however. A May poll by the First Five Years Fund found that nearly nine in 10 voters in key battleground states want political candidates to have a plan to make childcare more affordable.

“One of the most important ways that you’re going to bring down prices for families is by investing in the care economy,” said Boteach. “When families are sitting around a kitchen table and trying to make decisions about caring for aging parents or disabled relatives, or whether or not they can take time to welcome a new baby, those are personal decisions, but they’re also economic decisions.”

To the extent that childcare is a major economic issue for women voters, Harris and Walz can point to the governor’s bona fides on it. This year, Walz announced $6 million in grants to open or expand childcare facilities in Minnesota amid a statewide shortage of childcare providers.

“[Walz] is probably the only male leader out there that unequivocally speaks about care at this level,” said Reshma Saujani, president of Moms First, an organization that advocates for expanded childcare and other family-oriented policies. (As a nonprofit, Moms First does not support any candidate for president.)

“When we have rising levels of inflation, when we have market instability, the thing that’s crushing parents is childcare,” said Saujani. “Moms are done. I think we’ve had it, and I think we recognize post-pandemic that the structure, the system, society has failed [us].”

Andrew O’Neill, the legislative director for Indivisible, a progressive advocacy organization, also argued that Harris picking Walz threw Trump’s choice of Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate into starker relief. Vance has come under fire for his past comments about childless Americans, suggesting that they should pay higher taxes and have diminished voting power as compared to families with children.

Vance reportedly abandoned bipartisan negotiations on a bill to make childbirth more affordable and has voted against measures to protect in vitro fertilization in the Senate. He has also condemned universal childcare proposals, arguing in 2021 that “normal Americans care more about their families than their jobs, and want a family policy that doesn’t shunt their kids into crap daycare so they can enjoy more ‘freedom’ in the paid labor force.”

“There’s a really strong contrast in this particular election, given the rather disconcerting way that people like J.D. Vance talk about American families,” O’Neill said. “He seems to have some very particular views about the role of women and families, and an odd prioritization of motherhood rather than [the belief] that everyone that wants a kid should be free to have a family in the way that they choose.”

Although it’s still unclear whether Walz’s record will be enough to sway voters, it’s sufficient to excite advocates who have long yearned for candidates focused on the care economy. Harris’s choice of Walz “thrilled” Dawn Huckelbridge, the director of the Paid Leave for All PAC, which supports candidates that embrace paid leave policy.

“They, together, are probably the strongest paid leave ticket in history,” said Huckelbridge. “He just really gets in this very natural way the connections—and I think most Americans do too—between paid leave and care and reproductive freedom and everyday costs.”