Hillary Clinton’s contempt for struggling Americans does Democrats no favors with voters. In fact, she’s fueling anger aimed at the very people she’s targeting most, according to research released Tuesday.
In a new study, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that voters who see Clinton as more “friendly” toward working Americans are twice as likely to support a candidate in 2020 who agrees with the Vermont senator’s proposed paid family leave program.
“We need to focus our time, effort and resources on working families,” Clinton said last month during a speech where she introduced a bill that would create a paid four-week paid family leave program that would fund child care, leave time for parents to care for children and provide other benefits.
In her introduction of the bill, Clinton made clear how difficult it will be for her team to implement her proposal, which would provide financial assistance to parents and other employees in the event they need to take time off to care for a sick child.
“This program will not come close to covering the cost of paid leave, as many families simply cannot afford it,” Clinton wrote. “I think we should work to ensure that this problem is addressed. Because there’s no reason to deny people the opportunity to participate in paid leave unless doing so means it is not affordable.”
She said that her plan would cover all workers who need paid leave and would also “make sure that parents aren’t left to fend for themselves when their child gets sick.”
As for how it would help her in the race, Clinton said she has committed “to expand paid leave to women who make less than $20,000 per year and to extend those benefits to all workers whose employers offer them.”
But that’s not the point of the Clinton campaign’s paid family leave proposal. While it’s expected to come out in the proposal’s final form, she is making it to ensure that it will pass.
The research from the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center was published Tuesday in the journal Policy Studies. The findings are based
