Just one day after President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential election and endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris gave her first remarks as the person newly installed at the top of the Democratic Party ticket. “We believe in a future where no child has to grow up in poverty,” she told an audience in Delaware, “where every person has access to paid family leave and affordable child care.” It was a sentiment she repeated the next day at her first campaign rally. “We believe in a future,” she told the crowd in Wisconsin, “where every person has affordable healthcare, affordable child care and paid family leave.”
The issues that most directly affect children and their parents appear to be at the heart of the Democrats’ current campaign for the White House. “Right out the gate she mentioned child care, paid leave,” noted Melissa Boteach, vice president for income security and child care/early learning at the National Women’s Law Center Action Fund. And then she chose Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who signed a number of policies aimed at families into law, as her running mate. “She is positioning herself and positioning care as the issue that will in part define her candidacy.”
Both Harris and Walz not only have extensive track records on these issues, but have frequently gone outside the political consensus to push for bold policies. Their past stances, and the way they talk about the issues now, illustrate not just that they are likely to prioritize them, but what kind of policies they might champion if given the power.
As a candidate in the crowded 2020 Democratic primary, Harris had to find a way to distinguish herself. One important way she did that was with her children’s agenda, and one of the boldest planks it included was a paid family leave proposal that went far beyond what others in the primary were backing. She called to guarantee six months of leave, offer 100 percent wage replacement for people who made less than $75,000, and cover leave taking to take care not just of a new baby or oneself but also an expansive list of family members, including siblings, grandparents and “chosen family,” all with job protection built in. Her policy would have covered all Americans, including independent contractors and part-time workers. It was “the strongest, most inclusive, longest proposal for paid family and medical leave of any of the candidates in that race,” recalled Vicki Shabo, senior fellow for gender equity, paid leave & care policy and strategy at New America.
Harris has also backed other family leave proposals. As soon as she arrived in the Senate in 2017 she signed on as a cosponsor of the FAMILY Act, Democrats’ longstanding paid family leave bill that would guarantee 12 weeks of leave with partial wage replacement, and she continued to cosponsor it until she left the Senate to become vice president. Endorsing legislation so quickly, instead of waiting, is “not necessarily something a freshman senator would do,” Shabo noted.
Walz has his own strong track record on the issue, too. When he was in Congress he also cosponsored the FAMILY Act. Then in 2023 he signed into law Minnesota’s first paid family leave law, and it’s a strong one compared to other state laws. It guarantees 12 weeks of medical leave, including for pregnancy and childbirth, and 12 weeks for other needs, including caregiving as well as safety from domestic violence and sexual abuse; workers can take up to 20 weeks a year for both categories in a year. Workers can take leave to care for family members including siblings, grandparents and grandchildren, and people who also have a relationship that isn’t codified by living together. Their jobs are protected when they take leave, which is not always the case in other state laws, forcing many people to risk losing their jobs while away from work if they don’t qualify for the Family and Medical Leave Act. Wage replacement is progressive, starting at 90 percent of the lowest weekly wages and tapering for higher ones. The benefits are also portable from job to job, which means that if someone switches work the leave they earned from their previous job still counts.
“It builds on lessons from the other states,” Shabo noted. In California, for example, low-wage workers have struggled to take advantage of the program because it only offers them some of their wages. Research has also found that workers need to be assured that they will be paid at least 80 percent of their normal incomes for low-income workers and fathers to take it.
Walz also signed paid sick days into law, guaranteeing that employees who put in 80 hours a year can accrue up to six days off if they fall ill or need to care for a sick loved one. The leave can also be used for medical appointments, absences due to domestic abuse or sexual assault, and if inclement weather closes children’s schools.
Walz was, of course, not the only state lawmaker responsible for getting these laws passed, and advocacy campaigns had been waged for years before they did. But he was a vocal champion of them. “He enthusiastically was part of this effort,” Shabo said. Paid leave was part of his platform when he ran for office, and he’s tweeted about it nearly a hundred times. When recently asked what legislation Democrats should pass first if they hold the White House, Senate, and House in 2025, Walz responded, “I think paid family and medical leave.” He continued, “It is so foundational to just basic decency and financial well-being. And I think that would start to change both finances, attitude—strengthen the family.”
“I’m feeling bullish about their commitment,” Shabo said, “because of how prominent it’s been.” That could mean a lot, especially if Democrats control Congress next year. In the face of Democratic Senator Joe Manchin’s opposition, paid family leave was the first thing to be winnowed out of Biden’s Build Back Better legislative package before it ultimately failed, but he’s leaving the Senate, and Harris and Walz may not be so willing to trade the issue away next time around. “There’s real power in having the president and the vice president so committed to something,” Shabo said. She thinks “this issue would stay at a higher priority level.”
The two politicians have also been champions of child care and early childhood education. The children’s agenda Harris released when running for president in 2020 included the passage of Democrats’ Child Care for Working Families Act, which would cap many families’ child care costs at 7 percent of their income, improve compensation for providers, and work toward universal, high-quality preschool for three- and four-year-olds. Harris was also a co-sponsor of the legislation when she was in the Senate. Her children’s agenda called for more funding for Head Start and Early Head Start.
As vice president, she was the one to announce a rule issued by the administration that caps copayments for families receiving federal child care subsidies, encourages states to waive copayments for low-income families, and offers more financial stability for providers who accept federal vouchers. She has talked about child care as “kitchen table economics that families are grappling with day to day,” Boteach said. As a senator, she introduced the very first federal Domestic Workers Bill of Rights.
Walz has also championed the issue. He created a $6 million grant program to expand child care access, which his administration estimated would expand capacity by 2,200 spots. “Only a few states put in their own money after the pandemic relief dollars expired,” Boteach said. “Minnesota was among them.”
He signed a $252 million investment in early learning scholarships to help low-income families pay for child care or early childhood education, as well as $316 million to increase wages for child care providers. A bill he signed in May expanded pre-K seats by 12,360. The state raised the reimbursement rate for providers who accept subsidies, ensuring it was no longer one of the lowest in the country. He also consolidated state agencies so that there will soon be a one-stop-shop for child care. Walz “didn’t just sit back and sign bills into law, but he actually was out there working to get these bills taken care of,” said Amanda Schillinger, a child care director in the state. The legislation has “made such huge changes in our industry.”
It’s hard to know exactly what Harris and Walz would do about child care if elected to the White House, but “I do think they see it as the unfinished business,” Boteach said. Harris “was a leader in an administration that did more for care than any previous administrations, and sees that there’s a lot more to do.”
In her first campaign ad, Harris can be heard saying, “We choose a future where no child lives in poverty.” She followed that statement up in mid-August by proposing a child tax credit expansion that would give families $6,000 per child for the first year of a baby’s life, then $3,600 for children ages one to six and $3,000 for older ones. That goes back to her primary campaign as well. If elected president she vowed to sign an executive order “to end child poverty” and included a number of investments in her children’s agenda, including increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit. She was also, of course, part of an administration that helped expand the Child Tax Credit significantly, which cut the child poverty rate nearly in half in 2021. Walz is also a fan of a bigger child tax credit. As governor he signed into law a state child tax credit expansion that gives families in the state up to $1,750 per child, the most generous in the country. It’s expected to cut the state’s child poverty rate by a third.
Walz has also staked his reputation on a bill he signed in 2023, surrounded by a mob of children who swarmed him with hugs, that made Minnesota the fourth state to ensure free breakfast and lunch to all public school students after Congress ended the pandemic-era policy that ensured them for all students. “I’m honored and I do think this is one piece of that puzzle in reducing both childhood poverty and hunger insecurity,” he said at the signing.
Biden, of course, championed care policies and packed many of them into his Build Back Better agenda, only to see them stripped out of what eventually passed in the Inflation Reduction Act. But next time might be different. “If you have a team that’s putting a higher premium on care policies, it’s less likely they’re going to fall off the list entirely,” Shabo said. “Maybe a Harris-Walz administration would choose differently.”
“This is at the core of their economic agenda,” Boteach added. Given Harris and Walz’s records, as well as the things they’ve said so far on the campaign trail, care will be “a priority in a Harris-Walz administration.”
Bryce Covert is an independent journalist writing about the economy. She is a contributing op-ed writer at the New York Times and a contributing writer at The Nation. Her writing has appeared in Time Magazine, the Washington Post, New York Magazine, the New Republic, Slate, and others, and she won a 2016 Exceptional Merit in Media Award from the National Women’s Political Caucus. She has appeared on ABC, CBS, MSNBC, NPR, and other outlets. She was previously Economic Editor at ThinkProgress, Editor of the Roosevelt Institute’s Next New Deal blog, and a contributor at Forbes. She also worked as a financial reporter and head of the energy sector at mergermarket, an online newswire that is part of the Financial Times group.
