Charles Bruner is a former Democratic Iowa legislator (1978-1990), was the founding director of Iowa Child and Family Policy Center (1990-2015, now Common Good Iowa), and is national director of the InCK Marks Initiative’s Child Health Equity Leadership Group.

I am pretty certain all of this year’s Iowa Democratic candidates for the U.S. House and Senate would have voted for the Affordable Care Act in 2010, the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, and the Build Back Better Infrastructure Act of 2021. I am pretty certain they all would have voted against the Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017 and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025.

I am also sure all Republicans running for Congress in Iowa this year would have done the exact opposite. (Representatives Ashley Hinson, Marianette Miller-Meeks, and Zach Nunn did vote that way on the bills that coincided with their tenure in Congress.)

I am sure of it because all of those votes were on strict party lines. The Tax Cut and Jobs Act and One Big Beautiful Bill Act did not even seek any bipartisan support, as Republicans approved them through the budget reconciliation process.

Two national organizations now active in Iowa – Families Over Billionaires and the Campaign for a Family Friendly Economy – are engaging in electoral advocacy on the specific issue of where Congressional candidates are in economically supporting families and financing public investments in them by ensuring the wealthiest individuals and most profitable corporations pay their fair share. This is at the heart of the differences in votes on these bills and I think needs to be a much greater part of the Congressional electoral dialogue.

The bills Democrats in Congress advanced included expanding the child tax credit and making it refundable, investing in child care and preschool to make it affordable, advancing paid family and medical leave, building upon Medicaid’s foundation and expanding home-and-community based services, and expanding the Affordable Care Act premiums to make health insurance more affordable. They began to finance these by paring back on corporate income tax cuts and expanding IRS enforcement abilities on those with high incomes and wealth.

Meanwhile, the bills Republicans in Congress advanced included huge tax cuts directed to the wealthiest individuals and the most profitable corporations. GOP lawmakers also cut Medicaid, failed to extend the enhanced subsidies for health insurance premiums or the IRS enforcement provisions, and cut SNAP benefits. Republicans argued that theirs was a pro-family agenda, but largely on its ensuring that families receiving government support showed responsibility in fulfilling their roles.

Both parties recognize that families are the foundation of our society and economy, and that families today are stressed and vulnerable fulfilling their dual bread-winning and child raising roles. At the same time, their responses are quite different when it comes to making life easier for families.

Republicans speak a lot about families and the need to protect family values and parental rights. They mostly focus on preserving the married husband and wife, following traditional gender roles. Their actions are geared toward preserving the traditional family and its moral values, often against other types of families – including immigrant, gay, struggling single parent families, and unmarried parents. They also accuse the “woke” elites of pushing for diversity, equity, and inclusino as a way to further erode such traditional American family values.

The Republican approach pits one family type against others. It fails to value all families or even to genuinely support those traditional families experiencing economic or social stress.

Democrats speak much less about families. When they do, they usually say something about working families, then pivot to issues affecting workers generally, such as the minimum wage and worker rights. At the same time, other policies they promote are a true pro-family agenda. Those include an expanded and refundable child tax credit, paid family and medical leave, affordable child care, and affordable child and family health care that includes home and community-based services (particularly important to parents in the sandwich generation).

Whether traditional, blended, two-income, same sex, single-parent, or grandparent-headed families, the fact is that the Democratic agenda provides economic support to all families in fulfilling both their bread-winning and child-raising roles.

Traditional and white working class rural families, those who have moved most toward Republicans over the last several elections, are facing struggles to preserve their families and ways of life. But that is not due to particular discrimination against them. Rather, it stems from the economic challenges of the 21^st century in raising a family in their communities.

While an expanded and refundable child tax credit, paid family and medical leave, affordable child care, and affordable child and family health care would not on their own revive the rural economy, or place working-class families in full economic security, they certainly would make it much easier rather than harder for those families to fulfill their roles and raise their children as they want. Polling shows strong (and generally bipartisan) support for all these actions, although this has not translated to any bipartisan support in Congress.

I hope that Democrats running for the U.S. House and Senate will emphasize what they will do to support Iowa’s families and their specific positions on the above provisions and how to finance them and that Republican candidates will do so as well, including what they will do to review and revise some of the tax cuts in the Tax Cut and Jobs Act and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in order to finance them and reverse the cuts they made.

There are clear and profound differences in the policies Democrats and Republicans have adopted when they had control of Congress. A handful of votes in each chamber are likely to decide the direction of the next Congress in 2027. Voters need to know where candidates stand on the valuing families agenda.

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