WASHINGTON — When Democrats passed a new version of the child tax credit program in the spring, they hailed it as a targeted way to reduce poverty with direct payments to low-income parents.
It’s a message the party is now updating in hopes of reaching an even broader swath of Americans ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
In speeches, internal memos, and campaign-style videos, President Joe Biden and the Democrats are increasingly promoting the payments as a “tax cut” for the middle class, rather than a spending program that benefits only lower-income families.
Democratic strategists say the adjustment was implemented after months of internal discussion and research about the child tax credit as the party prepares to feature the policy heavily during the 2022 campaign.
“The things that have worked the best for the administration and the Democrats have been, as they say, ‘Money in people’s pockets and shots in people’s arms,’” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who worked for Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign. “And this is real money in people’s pockets.”
The placement of the child tax credit — a policy once part of the Republican “Contract with America” platform in the mid-1990s and has received bipartisan support in the decades since — at the center of the Democrats’ message comes as they figure out how to harness Biden’s agenda for political gain.
Many Democrats, including those at the White House, have determined that the child tax credit is among their best successes of Biden’s term so far.
“It’s become quite visible. I think people understand it,” Gene Sperling, a senior adviser to Biden, said in an interview with McClatchy. “And I think it’s why it is quite popular, I think, across the board.”
Not every Democrat is convinced that the policy is a political winner, and some public data points call into question whether a heavy emphasis on the policy is effective.
But a more pressing concern for Democrats is whether the enhanced version of the policy will survive long term. Lawmakers in Washington are debating whether to extend the new child tax credit benefits as part of their broader negotiations over a multi-trillion-dollar spending package.
Top Democrats warn that failure to extend the benefits beyond this year could result in political backlash.
“It would be a tax increase on families if it goes away,” said Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash., who has been outspoken in support of the policy.
Democrats voted in March to temporarily expand the child tax credit as part of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. The changes were the most significant to the program since its initial implementation in 1998, according to tax policy experts.
In addition to increasing the amount of money granted annually for each child, from $2,000 to $3,000 (and $3,600 for children under 6), it also allowed low-income parents who weren’t previously eligible to claim the benefits.
The new law also changed how the government delivers the benefits, sending out some of the payments in monthly installments rather than having parents collect it in a yearly lump sum after filing their taxes. Democratic strategists say they hoped the adjustment would make the plan more visible and tangible for the average voter.
The policy reaches roughly 40 million households, according to the Treasury Department.
Democrats tout the child tax credit as a way to cut child poverty rates in half. Biden called it a “transformative” policy in July that would help parents pay for things like sports equipment and braces. (Some studies argue the effect will be less than Democrats claim.)
MESSAGE TESTING
Over the course of several months starting in spring, a group of Democratic operatives conducted polls and held focus groups to see how they could frame a message around the child tax credit July that would appeal to the broadest group of voters.
Democrats involved in the effort said their research yielded a firm conclusion: Pitching the child tax credit not only as a spending program to help the poor, but also as a tax cut for middle-class families, greatly increased its popularity.
“We suspected early on that framing the CTC as a middle-class tax cut would resonate far more broadly than focusing only on poverty alleviation,” said Lanae Erickson, senior vice president for the social policy and politics program at Third Way, a center-left think tank. “For years, we’ve seen in our research that most families don’t consider themselves poor, no matter their income level, so we knew they’d likely hear the former as about them and the latter as about someone else.”
Third Way was one of several Democratic groups gauging the policy’s standing with voters. The think tank even hired a pollster from a firm used by the White House, ALG Research, to test the message, in hopes of reaching a wider range of party officials, including those who talk with Biden.
“We’ve been shouting it from the rooftops to anyone who would listen, from the administration to Congress to the party committees,” Erickson said.
Lake said discussing the child tax credit as a measure to reduce poverty was a smart opening gambit from Democrats because it galvanized support from the party’s base. But when it came to winning over more moderate voters, she said, the party needed a different message.
“For swing voters, it’s been more popular to talk about it as getting money back and lowering costs,” Lake said. “And you’ve seen the transition in the messaging because of that.”
The White House has heavily promoted the child tax credit, holding monthly events on the day the benefits are distributed to parents. Biden and other White House officials usually promote both the effect the policy has on child poverty and middle-class parents.
“Other than Social Security, it’s hard for me to think of a policy that is both such an important middle-class economic security provision, and at the same time, the same policy is important for fighting poverty,” Sperling said. “You often have programs that are one or the other.”
In more overtly political settings, however, Democrats are more likely to exclusively refer to it as a middle-class tax cut.
The Democratic National Committee, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee — the three entities most heavily involved in the party’s planning for the 2022 midterms — listed the “tax cut for American families” at the top of an August memo that outlined what lawmakers were planning to highlight when they talked to voters.
The three committees also released a campaign-style video in July, on the day parents first received their payments, blasting Republicans for voting against the “middle class family tax cut.”
COST CONCERNS
Republicans have criticized the Democrats’ revamped child tax credit as a corruption of an important program, treating it as an unearned entitlement rather than a deserved break for taxpayers. The program’s implementation has also been rocky at times, with some eligible parents not receiving their benefit.
Some Democratic pollsters are also concerned that, from a political perspective, the party’s emphasis on the child tax credit is misguided.
“I think if you look at the public polling on this, I think this is something that people expected to be very popular, and to be clear, I expected it to be popular, too,” said David Shor, a Democratic data scientist. “And it was something I was wrong about.”
Shor’s polling of the subject finds that, even when discussed as a tax cut, a majority of voters did not want to make the new version of the child tax credit permanent. Support for making it permanent only reached a majority when the benefit was more specifically tailored to lower-income families.
Other policy proposals Democrats are considering, like including dental and vision coverage in Medicare, receive much more support from the public, he said.
“The reality is, actually, the median voter has a lot of sympathy for poor people but is also concerned about the scope of government,” Shor said.
Other public polls show more ambivalence for the program. A new Morning Consult/Politico survey, for instance, found that 50% of voters support the expanded child tax credit payments, compared to 38% who don’t. But 52% of voters also say they don’t think the policy should be made permanent.
The program’s fate is uncertain Biden and Democrats in Congress figure out how to reduce a $3.5 trillion budget bill by as much as $2 trillion in the coming weeks.
DelBene, the Washington state congresswoman, said the policy is “legacy-defining” for the president.
“It’s a tax cut. It’s a middle-class tax cut,” DelBene said. “And that’s part of what the president talked about providing.”
