Democrats, Republicans Battle Over How to Win the Parent Vote

In the final push to Election Day, Democrats and Republicans are battling for the parent vote and the range of issues American parents face have left both sides thinking they hold the advantage.

Republicans remain concentrated on parental rights in helping dictate school curriculums and policies, as it proved a winning strategy in the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election. Facing a Republican sweep in the midterms, progressives decided they had to devote resources to winning over parents, but have opted to focus on financial assistance to stymie the costs of skyrocketing inflation.

"Parents are a really powerful voting bloc," Ailen Arreaza, the co-director of ParentsTogether, a nonprofit advocating for progressive policies, told Newsweek. "Your identity as a parent really defines so many of the decisions that you make, from what you buy, where you live, and who you vote for."

Democrats and Republicans have predominately focused the final stretch of the midterm cycle on inflation, crime, abortion rights and the situation at the southern border. Yet, a new poll released by ABC News/Washington Post on Sunday found that "education and schools" is the second most important issue for voters, with 77 percent calling it "highly important."

GOP Governor Glenn Youngkin's win in Virginia in 2021 suggested that Republicans were likely to sail into Congress on a massive red wave this year. Youngkin's "parents matter" campaign successfully clinched him the governorship in a state that has historically favored Democrats. In the months that followed, leading Republican figures like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis dominated headlines as they passed school-focused legislation, most notably the so-called "Don't Say Gay" bill, which they argued would give parents control over their children's education.

In response to a growing list of concerns, advocacy groups like Moms for Liberty, which has more than 100,000 members, were founded. In the 1 1/2 years since the Florida-based group launched, Moms for Liberty has cemented its position as a leading opponent of critical race theory and gender theory in public education and remote learning.

"All parents want to see their children be successful and live in a free country and be proud to be American," Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, told Newsweek. "2022 is the year of the parent. You have an increase in an extremely informed voting bloc of parents and I think it's going to be a change-maker in the midterms."

GOP campaigns in battleground states have picked up on this sentiment. Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor of Pennsylvania, has promised to restrict what teachers can teach "on day one," while J.D. Vance, the GOP Senate candidate in Ohio, wrote that "we must give parents resources to control their kids' education," on his website.

While Republicans have been successful in building a broader coalition of support by advocating for parental rights, Democratic strategist Carly Cooperman said, "Democrats in some places were slow to catch up to these sentiments."

Democrats have closed the gap of the "red wave" many predicted coming in the midterms, according to new polls, and control of the Senate could come down to a handful of races. In tight races, voter turnout is critical and Arreaza stressed the need for Democrats to market their policies to parents.

"It's important for Democrats to really tap into the parent identity, to speak specifically and directly to parents in the same way that Republicans and conservatives have been doing, with real solutions about what families need," Arreaza said.

While Republicans are focused on parental control in classrooms, Arreaza argued the control parents are really looking for is financial control. As groceries and consumer prices rise amid high inflation, the cost of raising a family has also increased and that financial burden is precisely what Arreaza believes Democrats need to target.

"What parents really need are solutions that will support families and those solutions exist. Democrats have brought them forward," she said.

This month, Senate Democrats made one last push to enshrine a version of President Joe Biden's child tax credit, which provided families with up to $3,600 per child, before Republicans are likely to take one or both chambers of Congress.

Wisconsin Democratic Senate candidate Mandela Barnes also called for an expansion of the child tax credit and increased access to affordable child care, tweeting that his GOP opponent, incumbent Senator Ron Johnson, "thinks working to make sure that Wisconsinites have access to high-quality, affordable child care is not his responsibility."

The top voting issue remains the economy, and polls repeatedly indicate that voters are looking for solutions to the rising cost of living. A poll released by the National Parents Union this year found that 74 percent of parents are extremely or very concerned about rising costs for gas and food, making inflation the top issue concerning parents.

"The weight of the world is on parents' shoulders right now and it's unsustainable," Keri Rodrigues, co-founder and president of the National Parents Union, said in a press release for the survey. "American families are being squeezed and are rightfully frustrated by what is going on in the economy and in schools when all we ever wanted was to provide a better quality of life than what we had growing up for our children.

"It is critical that elected and school leaders find ways to actively listen to and engage parents to find solutions that will ease the strain on American families," Rodrigues said.

As a central part of their agenda, Democrats are also pushing for universal prekindergarten and paid family leave, but neither policy, nor the child tax credit, made it into the Inflation Reduction Act signed by Biden this summer. Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman argued that Americans would have paid family leave "if we had one more Democratic vote in the Senate."

"Pennsylvania is Democrats' best chance to pick up a seat. I would be that vote," he tweeted last October.

Cooperman said polls show there is wide support among parents across party lines for a child tax credit and paid family leave, but that despite the popularity of those policies, "the Republican Party has shown little interest in expanding social programs in a permanent way."

While the GOP's apathy toward those policies should offer Democrats an edge on the parent vote, Republican strategist Jay Townsend told Newsweek that under the current political climate, oftentimes "anger trumps satisfaction." So, parents who are unhappy with today's schools or feel as though their rights as parents have been undermined may still be more inclined to vote for Republican candidates who have addressed those specific concerns.

But Cooperman stressed that the vote of parents is still up for grabs because the voting bloc cares about both having a say over their children's education and financial support for families.

Update 10/03/22 11:50 a.m. This story was updated to better reflect Arreaza's title.