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Leading New York Democrats know that theyre in hot water with voters over soaring crime, anti-COVID extremism, political corruption and other issues, so state Chairman Jay Jacobs and Gov. Kathy Hochul want to create a new ballot line for vulnerable incumbents ahead of Novembers election.

Moderate, independent and suburban voters are poised to rebel against the lefts pro-crime, anti-police, high-spending agenda. In Nassau and Suffolk counties, which saw big Republican gains last year, Dems fear their party brand has grown so toxic that they need an added line to avoid getting swamped in a coming red wave.

So Long Island-based Jacobs aims to create an independent third party to give his candidates some cover. Maybe the Unlike Most Democrats, We Dont Hate You Party?

But its not that easy to fool New York voters: Last year, then-Nassau County Executive Laura Curran created the Common Sense Party for the same reason. But Curran was still ousted as voters flocked to GOP candidate Bruce Blakeman.

So the Jacobs-Hochul plan to try the same thing on a larger scale tells you not only that theyre desperate, but that Democrats are out of new ideas even when it comes to conning the voters.

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NY Democrats are panicking over their brand they ruined themselves - New York Post

Earlier this year, approval for President Joe Biden among people aged 18-30 hit depths no Democratic president had plumbed in decades: the mid- to low-30s in Gallup and other polls. (Barack Obama never dropped below 42 percent among that group in Gallups surveys.) In some cases, the swing against Biden in 2021 totaled anywhere from 20 to 30 percentage points. He has since made gains in some polls but is still on unstable ground.

An alienated youth vote is an existential threat for Democrats in 2022: They backed Biden by a 25-point margin in 2020, voting at all-time highs. And in their hour of need, powerful Democrats are looking for answers from Della Volpe, a 54-year-old pollster with salt-and-pepper hair who is not on TikTok.

Hes hailed by industry colleagues and political operatives on both sides of the aisle for his encyclopedic knowledge of young voters, said Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster. John Anzalone, Bidens lead campaign pollster, said Della Volpes data yield so much depth of understanding of a misunderstood group. Della Volpe has led Harvard Universitys Institute of Politics Youth Poll since its inception in 2000, with former students including House GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.

Della Volpes longitudinal insight into young voters what moves them, how they feel about politicians and whether theyre going to unplug from politics altogether matters deeply for Democrats, especially ahead of 2022. Theyre also not as broadly studied or understood as, say, independents, even though they represent a core part of the partys base and their numbers are fluctuating. The party goes into the midterms in an unusual place with young people, Della Volpe said in an interview: There are more younger people in play than there were in the last two cycles.

Pollster John Della Volpe with students in 2018.|Martha Stewart/Courtesy of John Della Volpe

Where Democrats spent past elections mostly worried about whether young people would vote, this cycle is different, Della Volpe continued. In the face of economic unrest, disinformation and without former President Donald Trump as a foil, he said, Democrats need to persuade them and mobilize them. That is the new reality.

The pollster, who was part of Bidens team during the 2020 general election, still has the ear of many in the administration: Hes one of those trusted voices people in the White House turn to for advice, said one senior Biden adviser. Della Volpe has recently made several presentations to White House staff, according to people familiar with the meetings.

Bidens yo-yoing numbers with young people should concern everyone, said John Walsh, Sen. Ed Markeys chief of staff, who managed the Massachusetts Democrats successful primary campaign in 2020, which drew unusually high support among young voters for a 75-year-old senator. Government is not acting with the urgency this moment demands and theyre frustrated, pissed off.

I worry that some people are not listening to John, Walsh added.

Della Volpe has spent much of the last two decades listening to young people.

In 2000, Della Volpe conducted his first youth survey with two Harvard University students, who wanted to understand why college students participated in community service but didnt vote. At the time, Della Volpe had built a polling and market research business around dial testing cutting-edge technology of the day, in which participants would rate their reaction to political speeches or campaign ads on a manual dial. His roster of clients included President Bill Clinton, Sen. Ted Kennedy and major corporations.

But specifically, polling youth filled a void. No one was listening to younger people, Della Volpe said. Even now, young people are more difficult and expensive to survey. Theyre more transient, less comfortable picking up an unknown phone number and more likely to require different language options.

There are more younger people in play than there were in the last two cycles. ... Democrats need to persuade them and mobilize them. That is the new reality.

Pollster John Della Volpe

They didnt vote, so candidates didnt appeal to them or target them, and then they didnt vote, so it was this vicious cycle repeating, Della Volpe said.

Since 2000, the Harvard Youth Poll has grown in scope, publishing twice a year, with undergraduates developing questions and Della Volpe editing and sharpening them. In 2018, citing his own data, Della Volpe predicted that young people would show up in historic numbers, calling Trumps first midterm a moment of once-in-a-generation attitudinal shift around voting. Some pollsters rolled their eyes, but Della Volpe was right 36 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds voted that cycle, almost doubling 2014s rates and beating any previous midterm participation since the 1980s.

The Harvard Youth Poll has been the only consistent data set to look at change over time on this stuff, said Ben Wessel, who served from 2019 to 2021 as the executive director of NextGen America, the largest Democratic group focused on youth mobilization. Because of this longevity, he catches trends between politics and not-politics that the rest of the political world could really learn from.

Della Volpe also regularly runs focus groups, which makes him extremely effective at going beyond percentages and crosstabs a much more nuanced way of getting to the true viewpoint, noted Matt Barreto, a Democratic pollster who worked with Della Volpe on the Biden campaign.

Indeed, Della Volpes interest is less focused on quantitative feedback than on stories, describing it as almost a kind of political therapy. He zeroed in on how Gen Z is defined by anxiety through key events, including Trumps election in 2016 and the Parkland school shooting in 2018. It has made them suspicious of institutions and impatient for change, he wrote in his book, Fight: How Gen Z Is Channeling Their Fear and Passion to Save America.

In recent focus groups conducted over Zoom with two dozen Gen Zers, Della Volpe started by asking them to share something good that had happened to them recently. He followed up by asking if they felt like their personal lives were on the right track, and if they werent, why? He asked them about their mental health, the pressures and stresses they face. In both 90-minute sessions, it took nearly an hour before he explicitly asked about politics or politicians.

Focus on values first, second and third, Della Volpe said, its perhaps a unique perspective in politics.

A warning sign about young peoples political enthusiasm came out of Virginias governors race last year. TargetSmart, a Democratic data firm, found turnout among 18- to 29-year-olds dropped by just over a half a percentage point compared to the last gubernatorial election, even though Virginia worked aggressively in the last two years to expand access to the ballot.

Terrance Woodbury, another Democratic pollster, also stressed that hes not optimistic about young peoples participation in the midterms, noting that Virginias electorate in 2021 was 11 percent older and 7 percent whiter than in 2020.

The key question were facing is if youth turnout in 2020 was driven more by opposition to Trump than strong enthusiasm for Biden, said Tom Bonier, TargetSmarts CEO.

Claudia Cedillos, left, waves signs with her daughter Montserrat before a campaign rally for Democratic then-presidential candidate Joe Biden, on Nov. 2, 2020, in Miami.|Lynne Sladky/AP Photo

But if operatives are just focused on whos in the Oval Office, or on Bidens approval ratings, theyre not looking at the right data, Della Volpe said. He pointed to the third of young Americans who said they still planned to vote in 2022, according to his December Harvard Youth Poll. Thats equal to what participants told him in spring 2018, ahead of the midterm when Democrats flipped the House. Since then, theyve formed a voting habit over two elections, another indication that youth turnout might be higher in 2022.

But participation wont happen in a vacuum. Right now, they say theyll vote but if Democrats and Republicans ignore them, they wont turn out, Della Volpe said. Right now, theyre looking to vote.

It starts with communication, Della Volpe said, suggesting regular check-ins to update them on policy progress and citing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezs (D-N.Y.) disciplined cadence of Instagram posts as one example of this in practice.

Then, empower them, Della Volpe said. He noted that Democrats can sometimes stand in their own way in reaching young people because theyre intimidated and they get weighed down in the transactional nature of politics. Della Volpe pointed to the tack Biden took as he locked up the Democratic presidential nomination: Say, where do we agree with Bernie Sanders groups? Where do we agree, and whats the process to get there?

Della Volpe listed a handful of policy areas where potential executive actions from Biden would very quickly capture the attention of [young] people. The list includes student debt, mental health, climate change and dealing with the rising cost of living.

In large part, they have been following up on these issues, but its about extending the conversation in new and different ways to remind people that were not finished, Della Volpe said, citing as one example Bidens announcement of a mental health initiative during his State of the Union address.

Major progressive outside groups, though, think Biden can go much further. They argue that he should cancel student debt altogether or work more aggressively on his climate agenda.

NextGen Americas president, Cristina Tzintzn Ramirez, said young people want to see action, and thats why were yelling as loud as we can, please take action on student debt, because this is within the power of the Biden administration. Last week, the Biden administration announced another four-month extension of the pause on monthly loan payments and interest.

Its been over a year of a Democratic trifecta and young people are really disappointed because not much has been accomplished around student debt or on ambitious climate goals, said Ellen Sciales, a press secretary for the Sunrise Movement. People are losing hope.

Biden has turned his numbers around with young people before, a saga that may show a path forward for him in the next six months.

During the presidential primary, Bidens numbers with young people were also upside down. At the time, Della Volpe took a group of students to Charleston to conduct a focus group in February 2020, a week before the South Carolina primary. They dropped by a Biden event, and we probably doubled the size of the crowd, Della Volpe acknowledged.

After the event, Valerie Biden Owens, Bidens sister and a former Harvard Institute of Politics fellow, spoke to Della Volpes students, then pulled him aside for his private assessment of the primary race. Its not looking too good, Della Volpe told her. Biden had just finished fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire. He was about to come in second place in Nevada.

Owens, who got to know Della Volpe well during her stint at Harvard, told him: John, youve got to talk to my brother, because you were saying what my brother intuitively and instinctively knows, but you also have all this data here, she recounted in an interview with POLITICO. You relate the way that my brother relates which is, spoken like a true sister but my brother speaks in stories.

In this Aug. 7, 2019, photo, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden speaks to local residents during a community event in Burlington, Iowa.|Charlie Neibergal/AP Photo

A turning point for Biden and young voters came before Della Volpe joined the Biden campaign later that fall, but Della Volpe pointed to it as a sign Biden knew how to reach them: saying I hear you to Bernie Sanders supporters, especially young voters, in March 2020. Those three simple words, Della Volpe wrote in his book, were everything millions of Zoomers were waiting to hear.

John reinforced to Joe that people just want to be heard, reinforcing Joes natural way of doing things, Owens said.

Sciales, who organized on behalf of Elizabeth Warren during the presidential primary, said Biden was not young voters favored primary candidate, but once Biden became the nominee, he honestly stepped up and started listening to young people, putting together the Bernie-Biden unity task for and moving on his climate agenda.

The oldest presidential nominee in history eventually achieved historic support from young people in the general election.

But now, after two years of stalled agenda items important to young people, Democrats are worried about where young people are in terms of not feeling engaged or motivated right now, said Ben Tulchin, a Democratic pollster whose clients include Sanders and New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

You have to give them a reason to show up now, Tulchin said.

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Democrats turn to their Gen Z whisperer as youth support wobbles - POLITICO

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Over the last few weeks, a Democratic senator from Arizona blocked President Joe Bidens nominee for a top job in the Labor Department, dealing a blow to the White Houses pro-labor agenda. The same senator raised objections to the presidents nominee for U.S. ambassador to India, a crucial post for the Administrations foreign policy. Then that lawmaker excoriated Bidens decision to end Title 42, a controversial Trump-era pandemic measure that lets border officials expel migrants without letting them apply for asylum.

Sound like Kyrsten Sinema? She did do all those things. But so did Mark Kelly.

Such moves are a shift for Kelly. Since winning a special election in 2020 for the seat formerly held by the late Arizona Republican John McCain, the Grand Canyon states junior senator has been a staunch party loyalist. Unlike Sinema, Kelly has supported the Biden Administrations key legislative priorities, from Build Back Better to changing the filibuster rules to pass a voting-rights package. In all, hes voted with the Biden agenda 98% of the time.

This record has led national Democrats to lament that Sinema isnt more like Kelly. But faced with a tough re-election fight this fall, Kelly is increasingly acting like a maverick in the mold of Sinema.

Read More: What Does Kyrsten Sinema Want?

Close observers of Arizona politics say that Kellys move to the middle, punctuated by his strong opposition to ending Title 42, is a reflection of the political mood in the purple state he represents. Though Biden won Arizona in the 2020 presidential election, a March poll by OH Predictive Insights, a Phoenix-based non-partisan pollster, found the President 15 points underwater in the state, with 55% of Arizonans disapproving of his performance.

Kelly started out as a first-time elected official as a U.S. senator, dancing with the party that brought him, says Steve May, a former Republican state legislator in Arizona. But the public is turning against Democrats and being a Democratic Party soldier is not going to play well in Arizona in this election.

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The senators office rejected the notion hes changed course to curry favor with GOP and independent voters ahead of the midterms. Since day one, Sen. Kelly has worked with Republicans and Democrats to deliver results for all Arizonans. Senator Kelly continues to make decisions based on whats best for Arizona, not politics, Marisol Samayoa, a spokeswoman for Kelly, told TIME.

But its not hard to spot the shift in his political positioning as the November election approaches. Mark Kelly has been a lot more careful to stay below the radar until recently, says David Wells, research director for the Grand Canyon Institute, a non-partisan think tank. He hasnt stuck his neck out.

Kelly, 58, is a relative newcomer to electoral politics. The Kings Point graduate, who served two tours of duty as a naval aviator during the Persian Gulf War, first entered electoral politics in Feb. 2019, when he announced his candidacy to challenge Republican Martha McSally, who had been appointed to McCains former Senate seat.

Up to that point, Kelly was best known in political circles as the husband of former Rep. Gabby Giffords, a moderate Democrat who was shot in 2011 and suffered a severe brain injury. Together they created Americans for Responsible Solutions, a political action committee that pushed for stronger gun-safety laws and regulations.

Read More: The Real Lesson of the Tucson Tragedy.

Kelly ran in 2020 as a moderate. He vowed to foster bipartisanship in Washington and assiduously distanced himself from national Democrats, declining to say whether he would vote for Chuck Schumer as majority leader or support ending the filibuster. It worked. Kelly won with 51% of the vote, joining Sinema to give Arizona two Democratic senators for the first time in 53 years.

Contrary to Sinema, though, Kelly built up a reputation in Washington as someone the party leadership could rely on, according to a senior Democratic Senate aide. While he often voiced concerns about the Administrations border policies, he almost always voted with the party. During Bidens first year in office, Kelly voted to confirm every one of the Presidents nominees for cabinet-level positions and supported Bidens major legislative pushes, including the American Rescue Plan and the $1 trillion infrastructure bill.

Kellys first significant break with Biden came last November, when he helped to sink the Presidents nominee to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, one of the most powerful bank-regulating positions in federal government. Then, in January, he joined Republicans and five other Democrats to vote for imposing new sanctions over the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. The White House had been lobbying against the sanctions, arguing they would harm ties with Germany.

His breaks from the party line have only grown more pronounced. In late March, Kelly voted with Sinema and Manchin to block Bidens nominee to head the Labor Departments Wage and Hour Division, David Weil. Weil held the same role in the Obama Administration, but faced a raft of opposition from Republicans and business groups after signaling he would support increased protections for gig workers. Kelly also voiced concerns about Bidens chosen envoy to India, Eric Garcetti, based on allegations the Los Angeles mayor perjured himself by misrepresenting to Congress his handling of sexual-harassment complaints in his office. (Garcetti has denied any wrongdoing.)

On April 1, Kelly came out against Bidens plan to end Title 42, saying the administration lacked a plan for dealing with an expected migrant flux at the border once the directive expires. In turn, he introduced a bill with Sinema to delay the end of the measure for another 60 days. It was a reflection of the issues political salience in a state where a border crisis would surely become grist for attack ads against members of the party in power.

Democratic insiders see in Kellys moves a recognition that Sinemas independent streak, while grating to the national party, has paid dividends with independents and Republicans in Arizona. A January survey from OH Predictive Insights found that Sinema was viewed favorably by 44% of Republicans, while just 21% viewed Kelly favorably. I would be shocked if he wasnt seeing how popular Sinema was in Arizona, the senior Senate Democratic aide says. Shes the top-testing Democrat in the state.

Kellys best chance to hang on in November may hinge not on his own record but rather who GOP primary voters choose to go up against him. In what has become a common theme in Republican primaries, the top two candidatesJim Lamon, a solar power executive, and Mark Brnovich, the states attorney generalhave been vying to out-Trump one another. Lamon is running a campaign ad that shows him wearing spurs in the Old West while engaging in a gunfight with Biden (Old Joe), Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Crazyface Pelosi), and Kelly (Shifty Kelly). Brnovich, meanwhile, recently put out a new report saying that Maricopa County was subject to serious vulnerabilities during the 2020 election, even though he spent that election defending the integrity of the vote as the states chief law enforcement officer. The greatest advantage for [Kelly] is that Republicans are unlikely to nominate a rational person, May says.

Kelly has also amassed a campaign war chest of more than $27.5 million for his re-election bid. If his latest moves on Capitol Hill are any indication, you can expect those dollars to go toward making the case to Arizonans that hes more of a thorn in Bidens side than one of his legislative foot soldiers.

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Lots of Democrats Loathe Kyrsten Sinema. Mark Kelly Is Trying To Be More Like Her - Yahoo News

For much of the first year of Joe Biden's presidency, progressive Democrats pushed radical ideas to change Senate rules, abolish the filibuster, and enact their agenda with a simple majority.

Even Biden, ever the rusty weather vane of Democratic politics, eventually swung around to supporting the idea. Though he has a long track record of defending the filibusterkilling it would only demonstrate "the arrogance of power," he said on the Senate floor in 2005Biden in January officially called for the Senate to abolish the rule requiring 60 votes on most bills. "Let the majority prevail," Biden said. "If that majority is blocked, then we have no choice but to change the Senate rules, including getting rid of the filibuster."

For Democrats, however, the stumbling block during the first 15 months of Biden's presidency hasn't been the Senate's 60-vote "cloture" rule or the Republican minority's use of it. It's been that Democrats like Sen. Joe Manchin (DW.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (DAriz.) have objected to key parts of the party's agendaincluding the anti-filibuster campaign.

"Eliminating the 60-vote threshold will simply guarantee that we lose a critical tool that we need to safeguard our democracy from threats in the years to come," Sinema said on the Senate floor in January, just days after Biden's call to action.

Looks like she's about to be proven right.

"Democrats need to wake up, because right now they're sleepwalking into disaster, with no plan to avert it," writes Simon Bazelon, an advisor at the liberal political think tank Data for Progress, in a post published Monday on Matthew Yglesias' Slow Boringnewsletter. Bazelon cites polling data and historical midterm election trends to suggest that Democrats are likely to lose three to four Senate seats this year before heading into a potential electoral wipeout in 2024.

Bazelon's post builds on a tweet from David Shor, a Democratic pollster who has lately played the role of liberal Cassandra, in which Shor suggests that Republicans could be heading for a filibuster-proof 60-seat Senate majority after the next election.

It's probably right to be skeptical that Republicans will be able to swing 10 or more Senate seats in the next two electionsif for no other reason than the fact that politics change rapidly these days, and today's trends will be in the distant past by November 2024.

Still, a quick look at the Senate maps for the next two elections suggests that Republicans are poised to pick up several seats, even if the party can't hit the all-important 60-seat threshold. In 2024 alone, Democrats have to defend seats in Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia. That's 10 seats that Republicans could, in a very good year, flip. If you assume that Republicans will pick up at least two or three seats currently held by Democrats this yearArizona, Georgia, and Nevada seem the most likely to flip, and midterm elections are typically unfavorable for the president's partythen getting to 60 by winning seven or eight of those other races in 2024 is at least within the realm of possibility.

"'Business as usual' will result in President Trump or President DeSantis, with somewhere between 56 and 62 Senate seats," writes Bazelon. "And this is actually worse than it might seem at first. In recent years, Republican senators who have retired (or announced that they are retiring) have skewed heavily toward those who were willing to occasionally stand up to Trump, like Jeff Flake, Lamar Alexander, Rob Portman, Pat Toomey, and Richard Burr. If Trump returns to office, he will do so with a median Senator who is far more deferent to his wishes than the last time around."

Of course, it's also not difficult to imagine Republicans blowing it despite this favorable electoral terrain. Look no further than the GOP Senate primary in Pennsylvania to see how the GOP, now unmoored from any sense of commitment to principles or specific policies, is inviting voters to take one look and go running back to the Democrats. Grievance politics that lacks a coherent and compelling vision for the future of America will never provide more than a temporary electoral advantage.

But it doesn't really matter whether Republicans can reach the 60-seat threshold or not. What matters is that they are now overwhelmingly likely to have a Senate majority after this year's midterms, with a good chance of expanding that majority in 2024 when Democrats have to defend the gains they made during Trump's midterm defeats in 2018.

When that happens, Democrats, liberals, and anyone else who isn't thrilled by the prospect of an increasingly authoritarian Republican Party getting to enact its agenda at the federal level will owe a debt of gratitude to Sinema, Manchin, and other Democrats who resisted the urge to blow up the filibuster. Instead of an emerging and permanent Democratic majority, the party is now heading into a cycle where it is likely to be playing defense.

Thankfully, one of the fundamental virtues of the American democratic system is that legislative majorities are not all-powerful. Minorities in Congress rarely get what they want, but they can slow or stop the majority from simply ramming through whatever agenda it wants.

Some Democrats have spent the past year or so acting like that's a flaw in the system. They were wrong, as they'll likely learn very soon.

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Democrats Might Soon Rediscover the Value of the Filibuster - Reason

The expiration of the child tax credit expansion late last year sent an estimated 3.7 million children back into poverty and undermined the financial security of millions more. With the rising cost of living squeezing family budgets, the expiration of the credit could not have been more poorly timed.

Research has shown that the program, which provided families with monthly payments worth $250 to $300 per child, led to dramatic declines in food insecurity and helped parents offset the costs of school closures.

Democrats tried to extend the program on their own, but the effort fell to an intraparty squabble. There is the possibility of a new approach and one that has a surprisingly strong chance of working. Democrats can work with Republicans on a bipartisan child tax credit expansion as the most viable path forward. A similar approach worked for infrastructure, and there are plenty of reasons to believe it can work again.

A key obstacle to the Democrats attempt to expand the child tax credit alone was Senator Joe Manchins insistence that the monthly child benefit include a work requirement. Democrats chose not to compromise on that condition; they also ignored the option of expanding the program on a bipartisan basis. If persuading Mr. Manchin was hard, the thinking was, then convincing 10 or more Republicans to cross the aisle would surely be impossible.

But that assumption may be wrong. Consider that in 2021 Senator Mitt Romney released a child benefit proposal of his own, the Family Security Act. That proposal was more generous than the child credit from President Biden and earned praise from across the political spectrum, including an array of conservative policy analysts and thought leaders. The proposal also inspired conservative interest in child benefits more generally, from Senator Josh Hawleys Parent Tax Credit to the proposal for a Family Income Supplemental Credit from American Compass, a conservative think tank.

When it looked likely that the child tax credit would expire at the end of December, several Republican senators expressed interest in working with Democrats on a stopgap measure. Senator Susan Collins, for instance, said that she was open to proposals that would support working families and reduce childhood poverty and that she looked forward to working with colleagues of both parties on bipartisan solutions.

Bipartisan appetite for expanding the child tax credit is nothing new. During negotiations over the American Rescue Plan in 2021, Senate Republicans voted unanimously for a proposal from Senators Marco Rubio and Mike Lee to increase the child tax credit to $3,500 for children 18 and younger and to $4,500 for children younger than 6. The credit would be available only to the lowest income families to the extent that it offset their payroll taxes, creating a de facto work requirement. Despite sacrificing the simplicity and universality of a true child allowance, an expansion along those lines would produce significant benefits for children in poverty and provide greater tax relief in total dollar terms for working-class and middle-class families than the Biden credit. It also suggests that cost is not the main barrier to reaching a compromise.

Maintaining the child tax credits connection to work or earnings nevertheless remains a sticking point for most Republicans. To that end, designing the credit to rapidly phase in eligibility with earnings would serve to strengthen the child tax credits work incentive, helping to expand the labor supply and the credits bipartisan appeal simultaneously.

The focus could then be put on preserving an unconditional benefit for young children, say below age 6. Parents of young children have higher average poverty rates and greater upfront expenses, including child care.

An unconditional child benefit for infants is unlikely to face serious Republican opposition. Fears about work disincentives are simply much less relevant for parents of newborns. Senator Bill Cassidy has even proposed letting new parents pull forward $5,000 in child credits to help offset the huge expenses associated with pregnancy, which often include unpaid time off from work. And with the Supreme Court preparing to rule on a major abortion case, Republican interest in providing flexible resources to new parents only stands to grow.

Democrats may be unwilling to move off their ideal proposal, but some historical perspective is warranted. In 2016, Hillary Clintons presidential campaign proposed expanding the child tax credit for young children to $2,000 with a 45 percent phase-in. Reports hailed the proposal as a serious effort to tackle deep poverty, citing an analysis from the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The only thing preventing Democrats from advancing an identical proposal on a bipartisan basis today is their expectations for more.

An ideal compromise would therefore combine a larger credit and strong work incentive for parents of school-aged children with a robust monthly benefit for those caring for infants and toddlers. A deal along these lines would still have a large impact on child poverty, only now with the all-important benefit of bipartisan political support.

Enacting an unconditional benefit for all children remains a worthy aspiration. But given that the most likely outcome is now no expansion at all, failure to consider creative compromises makes the perfect the enemy of the good. The popularity of the bipartisan infrastructure package provides a template for how to move forward.

Helping American families raise the next generation should not be a partisan issue. But while Democrats are in the legislative drivers seat, its up to them to make it a bipartisan one.

Samuel Hammond (@hamandcheese) is the director of poverty and welfare policy at the Niskanen Center.

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Opinion | To Help Children, Democrats are Going to Have to Reach Across the Aisle - The New York Times