The First Five Questions For: Polling Expert Robert Blizzard

In this month’s FFYF’s First Five Questions series, FFYF Executive Director Sarah Rittling sat down with Robert Blizzard, Polling Expert and the Founder/CEO of UpOne Insights to discuss new child care polling data.

The new national poll conducted by UpONE Insights on behalf of First Five Years Fund shows child care expenses continue to be a major financial burden on working families. The poll, which surveyed more than 1,000 registered voters nationwide as well as an oversample of Republican primary voters, also found an overwhelming majority of Republicans want the White House and Congress to take action.

Check out the video below and read the Q&A here. 

Welcome to First Five Questions with pollster Robert Blizzard! 

Sarah Rittling: We heard from voters going into this last election that they expected the candidates they voted for to have a plan to address the challenges families face in finding and affording child care. Now that the Trump Administration and the Republican-led 119th Congress have been sworn in, we knew we wanted to go back and test these assumptions.

I’m joined by Robert Blizzard, who runs the polling firm UpOne Insights. He’s a trusted expert in public opinion, and he also conducted our latest poll in the week following President Trump’s inauguration. He’s going to take us through the findings, including that child care expenses continue to be a major financial burden on working families, that a majority of young voters are putting off having kids in part due to the high cost, and that there are clear policy paths that voters expect Congress and the Trump Administration to take. But enough from me – I’ll let you hear from the expert himself. Welcome, Robert!

Robert Blizzard: Thanks! Good to be here.

QUESTION ONE

Rittling: This is your first poll really delving into child care as an issue. But before we get into that, give us a sense of what typically fills your time. And where were you in the 2024 election?

Blizzard: This is certainly one of the larger national polls I’ve done on child care as an issue. But over the years I’ve worked in a number of states on the issue indirectly. Many of my public affairs clients with an education focus have increasingly been studying public opinion on early childhood education and the economic realities of child care for parents. 

Last year was an election year. Obviously most of my work is focused on winning campaigns from the statewide level down to Congressional races and local races. Last year I worked in several key states for the presidential race, the U.S. Senate, and half a dozen or so competitive Congressional seats. 

Increasingly many of my public affairs clients who are in the corporate or trade associate association space are also seeking polling during an election year to dive deeper into issues or better understand policy platforms on anything ranging from child care to education, to health care. It kind of runs the gamut.

QUESTION TWO 

Rittling: Recognizing you primarily work with Republicans, and given the makeup of both bodies of Congress and the White House, we decided to do an oversample of Republican primary voters. For those of us who don’t work in this space, can you tell us why that was so important to do right now and talk about the striking findings you found?

Blizzard: We conducted this poll right after President Trump was inaugurated. We did a national survey of a thousand registered voters, which is a pretty robust sample size, as well as a national survey among almost a thousand Republican primary voters. 

Look, there’s a Republican trifecta in Washington. President Trump controls the White House and the Administration and Republicans are running both Chambers of Congress for at least the next 2 years. 

Republicans right now are in a unique position to both set the agenda, and also to enact an agenda. And they were essentially given a mandate from voters nationally to do so. 

Digging deeper into the attitudes of Republican voters is a really smart decision to better understand the public opinion among the Republican base that most folks in both the US Senate and US House, as well as the White House, care about a great deal.

It’s essentially to get a learned sentiment among the voters who are most likely to reelect Republicans who will be running for the House and Senate again in two years.

QUESTION THREE

Rittling: As an organization and as an issue, we are fortunate that this is an issue where there’s general agreement across party lines. Given all that you laid out, what message do you think Democrats should take away from those numbers?

Blizzard: I’m happy to talk through some of the Republican numbers specifically, but the message Democrats can take away from some incredibly positive numbers here is a couple of things. 

Number one: There’s a willing partner on the other side of the aisle on these issues, with tax credits and tax incentives in particular, especially as tax policy is going to be an important issue later this year. 

And I think politically speaking Democrats really struggled with the types of voters in the last election that the Republicans won. Democrats should take away a message that a lot of these voters (and I’ll talk through the Republican numbers here in a second) are compassionate, and they do care about child care costs. It’s affecting them right on a daily basis, and there’s more common ground on these issues than some may lead you to believe.  

If you look at the poll that we did, and you look at just the Republican numbers, unsurprisingly, Republican primary voters could not be more thrilled about Trump being in office. He has an incredibly high approval rating. They’re excited, they’re optimistic. But I think when you dig deeper – out of just the political realities – into this you’ll find Republican primary voters, Republicans and really all voters overall are still significantly focusing on the personal financial situation that folks are facing.

Republican parents in particular are expressing a lot of concern about the financial situations out there. 

We saw in our poll a third of Republican parents say they’re not able to save money or get ahead financially due to costs of child care. Twenty-eight percent of Republican voters say that they’re struggling to feed their family, and a quarter of Republican parents are cutting back on other household essentials to afford child care.

And one out of five Republican parents agree that they are struggling to pay for child care costs. And again, that’s just Republicans and Republican parents. And we see similar data on the Democratic side as well. 

There’s significant importance placed among Republican primary voters on both the President and Republicans in Congress to have a plan to help working families afford quality child care, and I think there’s a sentiment shared throughout our polling that demonstrates that Republicans in particular believe it will help.

When we tested [child care] tax credits and tax incentives in the survey, I was not surprised necessarily at how high they tested in terms of positivity and support, but at the depth and breadth of support. Like increasing tax credits like the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit to specifically help parents offset that cost of child care – that was at 81% support with Republicans.

The flexible spending accounts which allow working parents to set aside those pre-tax dollars for child care expenses was at 84%. Tax incentives for businesses as they are trying to help their employees or provide their own quality childcare programs is 82%.

You know, one thing that this Administration seems like they want to do a lot of is to send more money back to the states – whether through DOE or sending money to the states through block grants – so that the states can best decide how to increase access to affordable and quality child care and let parents have that choice for themselves. Support for child care block grants [CCDBG] was at 65% support among Republicans. 

So very strong numbers here across the board, and with Independent voters and Democrats. But those Republican primary numbers throughout this survey are very high and very strongly supportive of a lot of these issues.

Rittling:Excellent and I’m starting to think you could come work here. You have all the talking points down, and we’ll be sending you to the Hill shortly. 

QUESTION FOUR

Rittling: If you had to pick a favorite finding, is there anything that comes to mind?

Blizzard: There were a lot of numbers in here that were very intriguing and interesting, and there was one number that kind of stuck out to me. When you’re a pollster and you go through a ton of polling there’s a lot of data in a survey, right? 

You’ve got just the top line data, and then you can look at as we did here among Republican primary voters or Hispanic voters, or independent voters or progressive. There’s lots of different ways to slice and dice it. 

But one of the data points that really stood out to me was 36%. And that’s 36% of parents across the country saying they are not able to save money or get ahead financially due to child care costs. That’s more than a third – or almost 4 out of 10 – parents. Again, that’s not a partisan data point, that’s all American parents. So I think that would resonate, too. Every member of Congress, everybody in the Senate, everybody in the House – they all have parents in their districts. There are parents in every district across the country, whether they’re a Republican member of Congress or a Democratic member of Congress, and the fact that more than a third can’t really make ends meet or get ahead financially because of child care costs has significant implications for a lot of other things, not just the day-to-day or month-to-month. 

There’s the challenge of trying to make ends meet in your monthly bills. But it also means you’re not able to go invest. It means you’re not able to go and do other things because you’re so strapped in by these child care costs. I think we all thought it was going to be a pretty decently high number. We all know a parent or have friends that have challenges with child care costs, but to know that it was 36% of all parents nationally … that was a pretty striking data point. 

Rittling: Yeah, I totally agree. 

QUESTION FIVE

Rittling: So I’m gonna leave us on a cliffhanger for a future time. We always joke about how we always think of the best poll questions after the poll goes into the field. So after everything that you’ve learned and digested about voter thoughts on child care, what one thing you would want to put on the top of the list that we ask in a future poll?

Blizzard: As you guys know, this is a pretty comprehensive survey, so that’s a difficult one. I think I think the one thing that may be interesting to get into a little bit is how many extended family members, or what’s the percentage of grandparents or other family members, that have had to change their lives around to help pitch in on child care for their own kid simply because of the cost? And what impact does that have on the economy, on the grandparents or extended relatives, and their ability to have their own businesses, or retire, or have to have lifestyle changes? 

And again, we all know someone who has grandparents or aunts or uncles, or extended family members pitching in because of the difficulty in affording quality child care especially for a lot of busy working parents. And you know, even in DC with a lot of folks now going back into the office who may have been working from home. They’re going to start to get pinched a little bit as well.

It’s just the economic realities of where we are now. And so I think that quantifying that, I think would be incredibly interesting.

Rittling: Robert – thank you so much for this.