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      Georgia Runoff: What a Walker or Warnock Victory Would Look Like

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      Surprises are always possible, but there seem to be few reasons to think Herschel Walker can improve upon his showing last month.A voting line that stretched into the distance in Atlanta on Friday.Dustin Chambers for The New York TimesMaybe it’s because I’m a former high school debater, but every few weeks I try to go through the mental exercise of imagining what I would write the day after an election — if either side won.It can be an illuminating exercise. I did this every few weeks before the 2016 general election, and I was always struck by how easy it was to write a plausible post-election story explaining how and why Donald J. Trump would win the election. This year, it was also fairly easy to imagine how Democrats would fare well. In each case, it made it straightforward to explain the eventual result, even though each case seemed less likely than not.Today’s Georgia runoff is a very different case. The election seems about as close — or even closer — than those other contests. But if the Republican Herschel Walker wins, I don’t know how I would explain it. I would have to shrug my shoulders.Of course, that doesn’t mean he can’t win. Surprises happen. Sometimes, a football team with a great record loses to a team that hasn’t won a single game, even though there’s no good reason to expect it.And in some ways, a “surprise” in the runoff wouldn’t take anything especially unusual. The polls show a close race, with the incumbent Democrat, Raphael Warnock, leading by about three percentage points. Similarly, Mr. Walker trailed by less than a percentage point in the Nov. 8 election results, and historically, the runoff electorate has sometimes been more conservative. By those measures, it wouldn’t take much at all for Mr. Walker to win.Understand the Georgia Senate RunoffHow Walker Could Win: Despite the steady stream of tough headlines for Herschel Walker, the Republican candidate, he could prevail. Here’s how.Warnock’s Record: An electric car plant outside Savannah could be the central achievement for Senator Raphael Warnock, the Democratic incumbent. But Republicans aren’t giving him credit.Mixed Emotions: The contest might have been a showcase of Black political power in the Deep South. But many Black voters say Mr. Walker’s turbulent campaign has marred the moment.Insulin Prices: The issue is nowhere near as contentious as just about everything else raised in the race. But in a state with a high diabetes rate, it has proved a resonant topic.But it’s hard to come up with good reasons that Mr. Walker would do better in the runoff than he did a month ago, even if on any given Tuesday any candidate can win.The core issue for Mr. Walker is simple: He is a flawed and unpopular candidate, while Mr. Warnock, by contrast, is fairly popular. And unlike in the November election, the two are the only candidates on the ballot in most of the state. This poses a much greater challenge to Mr. Walker in the runoff election than it did in the general election.It’s easy to imagine several kinds of voters who backed Mr. Walker in November but who won’t be showing up this time. There’s the Republican who didn’t like Mr. Walker, but who showed up to vote for another Republican — like Brian Kemp in the governor’s race. There’s the Republican who might grudgingly vote for Mr. Walker if the Senate were on the line — as it appeared to be in November — but doesn’t think the stakes are high enough to support someone who 57 percent of voters said does not have strong moral values, according to the AP VoteCast survey.Worse for Mr. Walker, there’s reason to think these challenges have gotten worse since the Nov. 8 election. Mr. Warnock has outspent him by a wide margin on television. The polls now show Mr. Warnock doing even better than in the pre-election polls in November.The final turnout data from the November election also raises the possibility that it will be challenging for Mr. Walker to enjoy a more favorable turnout than he did last month. Turnout among previous Republican primary voters outpaced Democratic turnout, in no small part because the Black share of the electorate dipped to its lowest level since 2006. Indeed, Republican candidates won the most votes for U.S. House and the other statewide offices.In other words, there’s an argument that the electorate last month represented something more like a best-case scenario for Mr. Walker in a high-turnout election. He still didn’t win. Conversely, the early voting estimates raise the possibility that there’s some considerable upside for Mr. Warnock if the electorate looks a bit more like the ones in recent cycles. According to our estimates, the electorate is arguably consistent with one that’s a few points better for Democrats than in November.Despite a curtailed early voting window, nearly two million Georgia voters cast ballots ahead of today’s election. By our estimates, Mr. Warnock won these voters in November, 59-41, probably giving him a lead of nearly 400,000 votes.Black voters represented 32 percent of the early vote, up from 29 percent in November.But it’s hard to read too much into the early voting numbers. The restricted one-week voting period makes it impossible to directly compare the results with those of prior years. And there’s not any hard, factual basis to assert that Mr. Walker can’t overcome his deficit on Election Day.In fact, early voting and Election Day results are highly correlated — in the opposite direction. The better a party does in early voting, the worse it does on Election Day. But there’s no doubt that these numbers surpass any reasonable set of expectations that Democrats might have had. To the extent it offers any signal, it’s a good one for Mr. Warnock.The race may be close, but it’s hard to think of a good signal for Mr. Walker. More

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      The Big Question the Georgia Senate Race Will Answer

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      What’s more powerful: a candidate’s skills and relevant experience, or the tug of political partisanship?As the second-most expensive Senate race in American history approaches its climax on Tuesday, we are about to learn the answer to a question the two sides in Georgia have spent more than $400 million trying to answer: Can a former football star learn just enough about politics to oust one of the most skilled communicators in Congress?Or has Senator Raphael Warnock been sufficiently nimble in navigating a difficult political climate for Democrats to stave off his ouster?In other words, who was right? The Republicans who warned this spring that Herschel Walker was too untested and too laden with personal baggage to win, or former President Donald Trump, who bet that sports celebrity and national political headwinds would be decisive?There is ample evidence for either proposition; Georgia is very much a purple state. Their first bout ended with Warnock just shy of a majority, forcing Tuesday’s runoff election. Fewer than 40,000 votes separated the two men on Election Day.Since then, Warnock has outspent Walker, his Republican opponent, by more than two to one — running 19 unique ads compared with just six for Walker.The campaign has grown sharply negative and increasingly personal in its closing weeks, with a growing focus on Walker’s rambling speeches and his treatment of women. This weekend, NBC News broadcast an interview with Cheryl Parsa, a former romantic partner of Walker’s who accused him of threatening her with physical violence.Walker denies being violent, and he has proved remarkably resilient in light of all the information Democrats have arrayed against him. Polls show no sign that his support has collapsed.To sort through these and other themes, I chatted with Maya King, an Atlanta-based politics reporter for The New York Times:It’s pretty clear that a lot of Republicans have come to regret the fact that Herschel Walker is their nominee. What are some of the ways they’ve tried to compensate for his deficiencies as a candidate?The biggest thing Republicans have done is call in national figures to serve as “validators” of sorts for Walker. It seems that Georgia Republicans’ biggest issue with their candidate is his inability to clearly explain the policies he might champion or deliver a campaign message straying from cultural red-meat issues that appeal only to his hyper-conservative base. That’s why you see him flanked by other Republican senators like Lindsey Graham or Ted Cruz in some of his television interviews.They have also campaigned alongside him quite a bit. At a rally on Sunday, Senators John Kennedy of Louisiana and Tim Scott of South Carolina gave remarks. And while neither Donald Trump nor Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has come to Georgia to campaign with Walker, they have attached their names to fund-raising emails for him.What to Know About the Georgia Senate RunoffCard 1 of 6Another runoff in Georgia. More

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      How Herschel Walker Could Win Georgia’s Senate Race

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      Despite all the tough headlines, he could prevail. Here are two theories about how the runoff could unfold.The steady stream of tough headlines for Herschel Walker has always obscured one stubborn fact about the Senate race in Georgia: He could still win.With the runoff election just days away, the conventional wisdom holds that Senator Raphael Warnock is waltzing toward re-election against an inexperienced Republican opponent who has a thin grasp on policy issues, avoids reporters, faces serious allegations about his personal conduct and has been known to ramble on the stump. But if things were that simple, Warnock would have won handily in November.And if there’s one thing American politics keeps teaching us, it’s to be humble about predicting what voters will do. With that in mind, here are two basic ways to look at the Georgia runoff on Tuesday:The case for WarnockUnder this theory, the runoff is Warnock’s to lose.Many Republicans will stay home, the thinking goes, because they no longer believe that their vote matters much. It’s hard to make the case that 51 Democrats in the Senate, as opposed to 50, would represent some huge threat to conservative priorities and values. Denying Democrats a majority vote on Senate committees is not the kind of argument that fires up the Republican base.Runoff elections are driven by who can persuade more of their supporters to vote yet another time. And Warnock has a battle-tested turnout operation that has now performed well over three elections.The Walker campaign, by contrast, is relying on Gov. Brian Kemp — who is no longer on the ballot — to drag a weak candidate across the finish line. Senate Republicans have basically rented Kemp’s field program for the runoff, but it’s not at all clear that an operation built to turn out voters for Kemp can change gears so easily. Walker drew about 200,000 fewer votes than Kemp did, suggesting that there’s a large chunk of Republican voters who find the Senate hopeful unworthy. Forced to stand on his own two feet, Walker might crumble.Democrats are also outspending Republicans heavily down the stretch. Since Nov. 9, they’ve spent more than double what Republicans have spent on the runoff on digital and television advertising — nearly $53 million versus a little over $24 million, according to AdImpact, a media tracking firm. The two parties were much closer to parity in the three months before Election Day, though Democrats had a slight edge in spending.The case for WalkerThe second theory rests on the fact that Georgia is still fundamentally a right-leaning state, as this year’s blowout race for governor showed. Perhaps the state’s historical tendencies will prove decisive in the runoff, whatever Walker’s deficiencies as a candidate.Warnock finished ahead of Walker in the general election by fewer than 40,000 votes. The Libertarian candidate, Chase Oliver, received more than 81,000 votes — and he is not on the ballot this time. Oliver earned about 50,000 votes more than the Libertarian candidate did in the race for governor, suggesting that he was a sponge for conservatives who could not stomach Walker. If only 46 percent of Oliver’s supporters vote for the Republican this time, Warnock’s margin on Nov. 8 will be completely erased.It’s possible, too, that voters who chose Kemp but not Walker in November will change their minds — if they show up, that is. Walker drew a lower share of the vote than Kemp did, not just in metro Atlanta but also in the most conservative areas of the state. According to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Walker ran behind Kemp by at least six percentage points in eight counties — most of them Republican strongholds, with the exception of Cobb County.Walker’s indictment of Warnock was always a simple one: He’s another vote for President Biden’s agenda. And, Biden, with an approval rating in the 30s or low 40s, is about as popular in Georgia as the Florida Gators. So Warnock was careful, during his lone debate with Walker, not to associate himself too closely with Biden.What to Know About Georgia’s Senate RunoffCard 1 of 6Another runoff in Georgia. More

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      Georgia’s Senate Runoff Sets Records for Early Voting, but With a Big Asterisk

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      A 2021 state election law cut in half the runoff calendar in Georgia, which had about twice as many days of early voting before last year’s Senate runoffs.Georgia has eclipsed its daily record for early voting twice this week in the state’s nationally watched Senate runoff election, but even if the state keeps up the pace, it appears unlikely to match early voting turnout levels from the 2021 runoffs.The number of early voting days has been cut roughly in half for the Dec. 6 runoff between Senator Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, and the Republican candidate, Herschel Walker, compared with last year’s Senate runoffs in Georgia.Democrats swept both of those races, which lasted nine weeks and helped them win control of the Senate. Since then, Republicans who control Georgia’s Legislature and governor’s office passed an election law last year that compressed the runoff schedule to four weeks.The 2021 law also sharply limited voting by mail. Election officials can no longer mail applications for absentee ballots to voters, and voters have far less time to request a ballot: During the runoff, a voter would have had to request a ballot by last week. And because of the law, far fewer drop boxes are available to return mail ballots than in the 2020 election and its runoffs.The result is a funnel effect in Georgia. Voters have a far smaller window to cast ballots, which has led to hourslong lines around metro Atlanta, a Democratic stronghold, even though fewer people are voting ahead of Tuesday’s runoff race than in the early 2021 elections. Democrats fear the restrictions will hamper a turnout machine they spent years building — which delivered victories for Mr. Warnock, Jon Ossoff and Joseph R. Biden Jr. two years ago.On Monday afternoon in Alpharetta, Ga., a northern suburb of Atlanta, the wait time to vote was 150 minutes, according to a website that tracks lines at polling places. At the same precinct, the wait was 90 minutes on Wednesday. Early voting ends on Friday.Gabriel Sterling, a top official in the secretary of state’s office, wrote on Tuesday night on Twitter that nearly 310,000 people had voted that day, surpassing the previous record that had been set on Monday.What to Know About Georgia’s Senate RunoffCard 1 of 6Another runoff in Georgia. More

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      Black Turnout in Midterms Was One of the Low Points for Democrats

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      But the effects of the decrease wound up being muted.The Democratic Wisconsin Senate candidate, Mandela Barnes, on Nov. 4. He lost by one percentage point. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesThere was a lot of good news — or at least news that felt good — for Democrats this election cycle, from holding the Senate to remaining stubbornly competitive in the House.But as more data becomes final, it’s clear that Black turnout is not one of those feel-good stories for the party.We won’t get conclusive numbers on this for months, but the evidence so far raises the distinct possibility that the Black share of the electorate sank to its lowest level since 2006. It certainly did in states like Georgia and North Carolina, where authoritative data is already available.The relatively low turnout numbers aren’t necessarily a surprise. After all, this was not supposed to be a good year for Democrats. Perhaps this is one of the things that went about as expected, with no reason to think it portends catastrophe for Democrats in the years ahead.Still, relatively low Black turnout is becoming an unmistakable trend in the post-Obama era, raising important — if yet unanswered — questions about how Democrats can revitalize the enthusiasm of their strongest group of supporters.Is it simply a return to the pre-Obama norm? Is it yet another symptom of eroding Democratic strength among working-class voters of all races and ethnicities? Or is it a byproduct of something more specific to Black voters, like the rise of a more progressive, activist — and pessimistic — Black left that doubts whether the Democratic Party can combat white supremacy?Whatever the answer, it is clear that the relatively low Black turnout was not exactly disastrous electorally for Democrats in 2022. With the possible exception of the Wisconsin Senate race, it’s hard to identify a high-profile election where Democrats might have prevailed if the Black share of the electorate had stayed at 2014 or 2018 levels.The Aftermath of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6A moment of reflection. More

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      Harvard, Herschel Walker and ‘Tokenism’

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      We are at a moment in which tokenism is on trial. This is true both in terms of the Supreme Court’s consideration of affirmative action in higher education and in terms of the candidacy of the former running back and political airhead Herschel Walker, who will become a U.S. senator from Georgia if he wins his runoff against Senator Raphael Warnock next Tuesday.Remember how common the term “token Black” once was? Back in the day — the phrase really took off in the 1960s — tokenism was considered a prime example of racism. The hipper television shows would offer story lines in which Black people were put into jobs for which they were transparently unqualified just so the company could show a little color.I learned the term “token” in 1975 at the age of 9. An episode of the Black sitcom “Good Times” had the teenager Thelma recruited by an elite private school sorority solely because she was Black. A white sorority sister visited the household to chat Thelma up. But after Thelma’s father saw through the ruse, the white woman dismissively referred to Black people as “B’s.” My mother told me that Thelma was being used as a “token Black.” She liked me to know about such things.It was normal that a Black mom would teach her kid such things back then. But you don’t hear the terms “token Black” and “tokenism” as much as you used to. (Yes, “South Park” had a character named Token — now spelled Tolkien — as late as the 1990s. But part of the joke was how antique the term had already become.) The term has a whiff of the ’70s about it, and it went out of fashion because, frankly, today’s left cherishes a form of tokenism.Our theoretically enlightened idea these days is that using skin color as a major, and often decisive, factor in job hiring and school admissions is to be on the side of the angels. We euphemize this as being about the value of diverseness and people’s life experiences. This happened when we — by which I mean specifically but not exclusively Black people — shifted from demanding that we be allowed to show our best to demanding that the standards be changed for us.I witnessed signs of that transition when racial preferences in admissions were banned at the University of California in the late 1990s. I was a new professor at U.C. Berkeley at the time, and at first, I opposed the ban as well, out of a sense that to be a proper Black person is to embrace affirmative action with no real questions. I’m not as reflexively contrarian as many suppose.There was a massive attempt at pushback against the ban among faculty members and administrators, and I attended many meetings of this kind. I’ll never forget venturing during one of them that if the idea was that even middle-class Black students should be admitted despite lower grades and test scores, then we needed to explain clearly why, rather than simply making speeches about inclusiveness and openness and diversity as if the issues of grades and test scores were irrelevant.I was naïve back then. I thought that people fighting the ban actually had such explanations. I didn’t realize that I had done the equivalent of blowing on a sousaphone in the middle of a bar mitzvah. There was an awkward silence. Then a guy of a certain age with a history of political activism said that in the 1960s and ’70s he was, make no mistake, staunchly against tokenism. And then he added … nothing. He went straight back to rhetoric about resegregation, laced with the fiction that racial preferences at Berkeley were going mostly to poor kids from inner-city neighborhoods. It was one of many demonstrations I was to see of a tacit notion that for Black kids, it’s wrong to measure excellence with just grades and scores because, well … they contribute to diversity?When the Supreme Court outlaws affirmative action in higher education admissions, as it almost certainly will, it will eliminate a decades-long program of tokenism. I’ve written that I support socioeconomic preferences and that I understand why racial ones were necessary for a generation or so. But for those who have a hard time getting past the idea that it’s eternally unfair to subject nonwhite students to equal competition unless they are from Asia, I suggest a mental exercise: Whenever you think or talk about racial preferences, substitute “racial tokenism.”At the same time, Republicans, despite generally deriding affirmative action and tokenism as leftist sins, are reveling in tokenism in supporting Walker’s run for Senate and are actually pretending to take him seriously. But to revile lowering standards on the basis of race requires reviling Walker’s very candidacy; to have an instinctive revulsion against tokenism requires the same.There’s no point in my listing Walker’s copious ethical lapses. Terrible people can occasionally be good leaders. With him, the principal issue is his utter lack of qualification for the office. Walker in the Senate would be like Buddy Hackett in the United Nations. It is true that Republicans have also offered some less than admirably qualified white people for high office. But George W. Bush was one thing, with his “working hard to put food on your family.” Walker’s smilingly sheepish third-grade nonsense in response to even basic questions about the issues of the day is another.And it matters that Walker would have been much, much less likely to be encouraged to run for senator in, say, Colorado. In Georgia, it was the clear intent that he would peel Black votes from his Black rival, Warnock. Walker’s color was central to his elevation. A swivel-tongued galoot who was white would not likely have been chosen as the Republicans’ answer to Warnock.But if Bush, like Walker and others, implies a questioning of standards — here, the idea that a high-placed politician be decently informed — is that so very different from those on the left questioning why we concern ourselves overly with grades and test scores in determining college admissions?Yes, there are times when one needs to question the rules regarding traditional qualifications. But the Georgia runoff isn’t one of them. The last thing Black people — who are often assumed to be less smart — need is for anyone to insist that Walker is a legitimate candidate because, say, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene isn’t the most curious or coherent sort, either.White Republicans have elevated a Black man to a position for which he is cartoonishly unfit. They have done so in spite of, rather than because of, the content not only of his character but also of his mind. Walker is essentially being treated the way Thelma was in that “Good Times” episode almost 50 years ago.The past was better in some ways. The prevalence of the term “token Black” from the 1960s to the ’80s was one of them. And I promise — although I shouldn’t have to — that this does not mean I think Black America was better off in 1960.But when Black students submitting dossiers of a certain level are all but guaranteed admission to elite schools despite the fact that the same dossiers from white or Asian students would barely get them a sniff, they are being treated, in a way, like Walker. The left sings of life experience and diversity, while the right crows about authenticity and connection. I hear all of them, intentionally or not, thinking about “the B’s.”John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of “Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever” and, most recently, “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.” More

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      Was Election Denial Just a Passing Threat?

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      Or is it here to stay?In the months before the midterm elections, a reporter for Time magazine asked Mark Finchem, the Republican nominee for secretary of state in Arizona, why he was so convinced that Donald Trump had won the state in 2020 despite all evidence to the contrary.“It strains credibility,” Finchem responded. “Isn’t it interesting that I can’t find anyone who will admit that they voted for Joe Biden?”It was as succinct an explanation as any for why so many Americans believed the 2020 election had been stolen. Republicans, especially those living in deep-red areas, knew so few Democrats that it beggared their imagination that anyone, as Finchem put it, would vote for one.Now, two political scientists have put some rigor behind this idea. The more that voters were surrounded by other Republicans, Nicholas Clark and Rolfe Daus Peterson of Susquehanna University report in a forthcoming research paper, the more likely that they were to say that the 2020 election had been stolen, controlling for other factors.Using survey data collected through the Voter Study Group, a nonpartisan research project, Clark and Peterson tested two alternate hypotheses:The more rural voters were, the more likely they were to say that the 2020 election had been stolen.The more Republican their congressional district was, the more likely they were to say that the 2020 election had been stolen.When the two researchers ran the numbers, they found that both hypotheses were true. The Trumpier voters’ surroundings — whether measured by population density or by Trump’s margin of victory in their congressional district — the more likely they were to say that Biden had stolen the presidency.These voters are living in what Clark and Peterson describe as “ideological and cultural vacuums” — and for this reason, the professors fear, election denialism is not going away. In the future, they write, “the public’s trust in the integrity of elections cannot be taken for granted by elected officials.”Elaborating on that point in an interview, Clark emphasized that his findings were still preliminary. But he came up with the idea for the paper, he said, because he lived in a heavily pro-Trump area and had heard a lot of people advance a version of Finchem’s argument. That experience has left Clark with the impression that America’s partisan geography offers fertile soil for unscrupulous politicians who seize upon public misconceptions about elections.“The door has been opened on it now, and there’s always the possibility that a politician can take advantage of it more effectively than Trump has,” Clark said.Election denial isn’t a loser everywhereIt’s a sobering finding at a time when one of the dominant narratives emerging from the 2022 midterm elections is that election deniers were trounced at the ballot box. That was true in many places — and for the highest-profile candidates — but it was hardly the case everywhere.In Indiana and Wyoming, for instance, voters elected secretaries of state who expressed support for Trump’s claims of fraud, while voters in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and New Mexico rejected similar candidates. Most of the 139 House members who voted against certifying the 2020 election results for Pennsylvania were re-elected. And in Arizona, the Republican candidates for governor and attorney general are still disputing the results.The Aftermath of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6A moment of reflection. More

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      What Does the New Congress Mean for Family Policy?

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      Now that the dust has (nearly) settled on the 2022 midterm elections and Republicans are preparing to take control of the House while Democrats will hold onto the Senate, I wanted to check in with some family policy advocates to see what a split Congress might mean for investments in caregiving.To recap: The initial formulation of the Biden administration’s Build Back Better plan offered the prospect of “the most transformative investment in children and caregiving in generations,” including large investments in child care, elder care and expanded child tax credits. Permanently funded federal paid family leave was also on the table.None of that happened in the current Congress, with Democrats narrowly holding both houses, despite the fact that child care and leave are extremely popular. According to a new national online survey of over 1,000 voters from the First Five Years Fund: “65 percent of voters say they are disappointed (45 percent) or even angry (20 percent) that Congress failed to act” on child care this year. “Suburban women are even more dismayed — 71 percent describe themselves as angry or disappointed.”Further, 81 percent of respondents say that their member of Congress should work with the Biden administration to expand affordable child care options; 65 percent of Republicans agree. According to a Morning Consult-Politico poll from about a year ago, paid family and medical leave is even more popular; only 5 percent of registered voters said it should not be available.When I asked some of my readers in the sandwich generation about what would make their lives easier, many of them echoed the sentiments of Liza Clay Yu, who has two kids under 4 and is also caring for several older family members: “I think the most helpful thing we could hope for would be affordable, reliable, high-quality child care.”So do we have any hope that these very necessary care infrastructure policies will move forward now?Let’s remember that we still have a brief period before the 118th Congress takes over in January. Sarah Rittling, the executive director of the First Five Years Fund, said “a lot gets done potentially at the last minute,” and while she doesn’t expect any child care plans as generous as those in the original B.B.B. framework, something could be squeezed in before the end of 2022.There’s also the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (P.W.F.A.), which would require employers to make reasonable accommodations for pregnant and postpartum and nursing workers, which already passed the House with bipartisan support. Reasonable accommodations could include a designated space for pumping breast milk, a chair to sit in for a supermarket cashier or temporary relief from certain workplace duties if they are dangerous, said Dina Bakst, the co-founder and co-president of the advocacy group A Better Balance.The bill’s proponents believe it could pass the Senate, it just needs to be put to a vote. “Leader Schumer should bring P.W.F.A. up immediately,” Bakst said. “Working women have been the backbone of our economy, and we need our leaders to stand up and give pregnant and postpartum workers the respect they deserve.” Bakst is not optimistic that P.W.F.A. would pass the House again under its new Republican leadership. “We’re literally at the end,” she said.Bakst is probably right. Christine Matthews, a pollster who’s worked with Republican clients in the past, pointed me to the Congressional Republican Study Committee Family Policy Agenda, and said “that is broadcasting what they are focused on in terms of family and children policies.” She was not surprised to see that the document listed, as its No. 1 agenda item, the statement: “We support the protection of children from far-left ideologies inside and outside the classroom.”There is child care legislation on that agenda, but it mostly concerns deregulating the industry so that it might become less expensive rather than using federal money to raise pay for care workers. That doesn’t appear to fix one of the most critical child care problems we currently have, which stems from a worker shortage owing to low pay in the industry.Similarly, the current Republican Study Committee agenda doesn’t propose a traditional paid family leave plan like those in many of our peer nations. Rather, it offers suggestions about how workers could transfer overtime pay into more paid days off and allowing states to extend Medicaid coverage for postpartum women to last more than 60 days.Even though things don’t look particularly rosy for family policy at the federal level, there are small wins happening at the state level. Vicki Shabo, a senior fellow for paid leave policy and strategy at New America, a left-leaning think tank, said, of paid family leave, “on balance, I’m excited about the possibility of state progress in places like Maine, where there’s a legislative effort and a potential ballot for 2023.” She also mentioned movement toward paid leave happening in Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota and New Mexico.Jocelyn Frye, the president of the National Partnership for Women and Families, who calls herself an “eternal optimist” about policy at the federal level, said she believes the conversation has moved forward in recent years. “The path is complicated, but the urgency is real” and “the support for the policies is real.” Going forward, she added, “the conversation will be less about whether there’s a value in paid leave, and increasingly a conversation about what paid leave should look like.”After a few of these conversations, I had a measure of guarded optimism about the prospects for some of these policies. I think the pandemic changed the national calculus around the issue of care. I believe more people of all political stripes are beginning to realize that many Americans need robust governmental support to continue working while raising our families.Shabo co-wrote a report for New America that found rural Americans — who do not tend to vote for Democrats — are in particular need of paid leave, because they tend to live much farther from care options. “Without access to paid sick time and paid leave for serious family and medical needs, workers are often forced to manage taking care of themselves or loved ones without pay while struggling to make ends meet, potentially jeopardizing their health, job or economic security,” the report notes. Matthews said that in focus groups she conducted among Americans from rural areas, “men were just as interested in paid family leave as the women, because they had much more rigid jobs,” and they could get fired for taking time off to care for a sick relative or wife who was having health issues postpartum.These aren’t women’s issues. They aren’t urban issues and they aren’t mom issues. They are everybody issues. The incoming Congress should remember that.Want More?In October, The Times’s Dana Goldstein reported, “Why You Can’t Find Child Care: 100,000 Workers Are Missing.” The question: “Where did they go?” The answer: “To better-paying jobs stocking shelves, cleaning offices or doing anything that pays more than $15 an hour.” In the clichéd parlance of the internet: The math is not mathing.Another congressional battle is shaping up over expanded child tax credits, which lapsed at the end of 2021, reports The Times’s Jason DeParle: “Some Democrats hope to revive payments to small groups of parents as part of a year-end tax deal, and despite Republicans taking control of the House in January, restoring the full program remains a long-term Democratic goal.”Some anti-abortion advocates are now arguing for more generous family policies. “Fighting state-level battles at the ballot box requires a greater willingness to find compromise and credible commitment to supporting women and children, rather than the legal strategy that, by necessity, took center stage from 1973 until this year,” wrote Patrick T. Brown in America magazine. He made a similar argument in a guest essay for Opinion in May.American rail workers may go on strike over the issue of paid sick leave. According to reporting in October by The Times’s Peter S. Goodman:“More than anything, workers expressed outrage over their lack of paid sick leave. Most spoke on the condition that they not be named, citing the risk of being disciplined or fired.”“‘You had guys that just didn’t want to share that they had Covid because they couldn’t afford to take off,’ said a former member of a traveling maintenance gang for a major railroad based in Alabama. ‘I believe it added to the spread on the road.’”Tiny VictoriesParenting can be a grind. Let’s celebrate the tiny victories.I designated an old pair of sweatpants as my mealtime pants. Since I frequently have a child sitting in my lap at a meal, I don’t care when those pants get covered in food.— Lisa Leininger, Ann Arbor, Mich.If you want a chance to get your Tiny Victory published, find us on Instagram @NYTparenting and use the hashtag #tinyvictories, email us or enter your Tiny Victory at the bottom of this page. Include your full name and location. Tiny Victories may be edited for clarity and style. Your name, location and comments may be published, but your contact information will not. By submitting to us, you agree that you have read, understand and accept the Reader Submission Terms in relation to all of the content and other information you send to us. More