Last week, I was in Durham, North Carolina, for a roundtable with parents to discuss a range of issues affecting families in North Carolina and the Triangle. Given the country’s current economic travails, the focus was largely on the cost of living.
Durham is a heavily Democratic county in a swing state. What I heard should give Democratic leaders pause about the strategy they’re pursuing to win back the working class. I’ll say more about that in a bit, but here are three big takeaways.
Healthcare is a trap, not just a cost.
Families aren’t just stressed about bills — they’re making major life decisions (who works, how much to earn, even whether to ask questions at a doctor’s appointment) around healthcare coverage. The benefits cliff is particularly acute: multiple families described actively limiting income to avoid losing Medicaid eligibility. The system punishes upward mobility and the pursuit of economic opportunity.
One participant is on a payment plan for a medical bill from prenatal care for a pregnancy almost a decade ago. She will be paying on that bill until that child is 30.
Time poverty is the hidden stressor.
Housing costs, healthcare, and childcare get policy attention, but what participants felt most viscerally was the erosion of quality time with their children. Exhaustion, rigid work schedules, and long commutes leave precious little real family time each day. This lack of time generates complex feelings of guilt and shame. Several described the Italian or French models of work-life balance as ideal, proof that other arrangements for work and family life are possible.
Parents are navigating parenthood alone.
Whether it’s childcare, school choice, Medicaid re-enrollment, elder care paperwork, or social media risks, families described piecing everything together without institutional support or clear guidance. The systems that exist — healthcare billing, childcare markets, and even public education are opaque and, seemingly, adversarial. What participants seemed to want isn’t more programs but more legible systems and an active partnership with those systems. They want to be treated as capable adults.
One parent said something particularly memorable about how she thinks about navigating the systems designed to help her family: “You have to jump out of the system. You can’t crawl out.” I asked her to elaborate, and she said that a small income increase isn’t enough to “crawl” out of the system. You need a large one, because earning just a little more can mean losing Medicaid coverage or a childcare subsidy entirely, leaving you worse off financially than before.
What I think this means for Democrats
Durham County votes heavily Democratic. It is the home of Duke University and North Carolina Central University. It is highly educated and populated by many people who could only be described as “elite.” Only 18.16% of voters selected Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. The population is 55% white and 33.6% Black. Durham has a long history of Black leadership in business, politics, entrepreneurship, and civil society, and has historically had a robust Black middle class. In other words, Democrats should do well here — and they do — but this roundtable revealed how Democrats should be talking about these issues, but aren’t. Listening to their own very likely voters in places like Durham reveals that they are out of touch even with them, and listening more closely — perhaps a bit less to advocacy groups — could help refine a winning message ahead of the 2028 cycle.
Parents don’t just want services and programs. They want legibility and partnership rooted in a sense of their own contributions to the common good and a sense of belonging.
Economic productivity and wealth-building are less about career advancement and more about relieving the exhaustion that comes from piecing together jobs and resources. Support for childcare, housing, and healthcare should focus less on the contribution those things make to the economy or to personal career advancement — let’s drop the language of “ROI” — and more on affirming the dignity of the contribution parents are already making.
Parents feel that large institutions and systems don’t have their backs. Taking on corporate power, forcing corporate responsibility, and a return to the local, the human, the cooperative, and the small is as much a “family policy” as anything else. Throughout this conversation with parents, I could detect a theme that large, bureaucratic systems — government, corporate, and even nonprofit — have drifted so far from the human scale and human values that parents no longer expect them to help or make things easier in ways that honor the work parents do every day to build the common good and our shared future.
Thanks to Book Harvest, Thrive Durham, and their wonderful teams for hosting and helping organize this roundtable.
Thanks Joe for this "real world" report from Durham that graphically illustrates why parents don’t just want government services and programs - they want legibility and partnership rooted in a sense of their own contributions to the common good and a sense of belonging. This is exactly what we are seeking to do through two national initiatives that I am involved with the Investing in Flourishing initiative and the new Center for Family Flourishing initiative. Both initiatives are centered on offering non government community based solutions at the local level where families are heard and included in building personalized pathways through the maze of available assistance (government and non government programs) while building up their sense of belonging and contributions towards long term solutions for thriving. Your "real world" Durham report is a great confirmation on why better solutions are needed now for helping families that are struggling to get by.