Unlike the contentious debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump in September, the debate between their two running mates on Tuesday was relatively mild-mannered, with occasional areas of polite agreement. One such moment of comity between Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Ohio Senator JD Vance was on the importance of child care, and the belief that it was overly expensive and difficult for parents to raise children.

“I think there is a bipartisan solution here because a lot of us care about this issue,” Vance said in response to a moderator’s question on child care. Walz later added that he did not think Vance and he “are that far apart.” The rub, however, lies in how to solve the problem of high child care costs. Walz and Vance may be further apart than they claim.

Child care can be massively expensive for parents, comprising a high percentage of a household’s monthly income. Unlike many other developed countries, the United States does not subsidize the cost of child care facilities. There is also a shortage of child care workers, and facilities find it difficult to fill openings because of low wages; according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, child care workers in a professional facility earned an average of roughly $30,000 per year in 2023, less than the average wages of waiters or retail cashiers.

While there may be bipartisan agreement that this is indeed a problem, the party’s diverge philosophically on how to fix it, said Oren Cass, the founder of American Bridge, a think tank that promotes a more populist interpretation of conservative social policy.

“The Democratic Party tends to see child care—meaning the commercial service of somebody taking care of the kids that the family pays for—as a sort of discrete, standalone service that government should be providing support for,” said Cass, who previously served as an adviser to Mitt Romney. “I think conservatives are much more reluctant to go in that direction, not because they oppose that, but because, I think, they recognize that that is only one of many ways a family might want to arrange parenting and childcare.”

As a modern warrior of the MAGA movement, with the occasional overture to populism that entails, Vance has spoken about child care access and the role that government should play in ensuring its affordability. At the debate on Tuesday, he highlighted how his own family situation—two working parents—echoed that of many other households, saying that his wife was “an incredible mother to our three beautiful kids, but is also a very, very brilliant corporate litigator.” But even someone with all of his wife’s advantages could find it difficult to raise children, Vance continued, arguing that there was “cultural pressure” on new mothers.

“A lot of young women would like to go back to work immediately. Some would like to spend a little........

© New Republic