Why these voters, and why now
Michigan opened voting on September 24, earlier than most states. Voters have been able to cast absentee ballots since then, and some cities open early in-person voting on October 5. Jocelyn Benson and John James debate for governor on the evening of October 6, the same day Tom Barrett and William Lawrence debate in the 7th District. Abdul El-Sayed and Mike Rogers debate for the Senate on October 8.
Jobs will be near the center of those debates. In our weekly read of the issues shaping every race we track, jobs rank second in both the governor's race and the Senate race, and third in the 7th District. They've been first or second in the governor's race since late August, and they climbed to second in the Senate race in September.
For many of the voters most focused on jobs, the biggest household cost is childcare. Childcare already weighs more on Michigan voters than on most. It's the biggest household cost for about three in ten of them, one of the five highest shares in the country. And the more focused a Michigan voter is on jobs, the more likely childcare is to be the biggest cost. Among the voters on this map, it's close to half, 792,122 voters. They're the amber dots.
The jobs voters whose biggest household cost is childcare stand apart as a group. Almost all of them have children at home. About two in three are women, and nearly all are of working age. Most are married and own their homes, and they're less likely than Michigan voters overall to have finished college. They're spread across the state much like Michigan's electorate as a whole, with four in five outside the densest city neighborhoods, and they make up most of the jobs voters in Ottawa, Allegan, Midland, Lapeer, St. Clair and Monroe counties. For these voters, childcare is the cost of going to work.
The other jobs voters, the teal dots, look different. More than a third of them are under 30, most don't have children at home, and fewer than half own their homes. They're more likely than the childcare group to live in the densest city neighborhoods, and Wayne County alone is home to more than a quarter of them. For half of these other jobs voters, the biggest household cost is gas and utilities, and for another third it's housing.
That makes the childcare group a real part of each of these races. PharosGraph tracks, race by race, which voters are firmly behind a candidate and which are still open-minded. In each race, about one in ten of the voters still open to persuasion is a jobs voter whose biggest household cost is childcare. That's 365,483 voters in the Senate race, 342,519 in the governor's race, and between 25,000 and 31,000 in each of the 4th, 7th and 10th District races and the 8th District race between Kristen McDonald Rivet and Thomas J. Smith. The childcare group also turns out. About seven in ten cast a ballot in 2024, in line with Michigan overall. Working-age voters with children at home, who vote and haven't settled on a candidate, are voters these races still have to win.
Yet childcare doesn't rank among the top issues in any Michigan race we track. The candidates are about to debate jobs without the cost that weighs most on the jobs voters in the childcare group. Because jobs focus and childcare costs are each their own PharosGraph audience, a campaign or outside organization can put a message that ties jobs to childcare costs in front of the childcare group and a different jobs message in front of the other jobs voters, whose biggest bills are energy and housing.
Jobs moved from fifth to second in the Senate race in September. That's why we rank the issues in every race weekly and refresh these audiences every month, so the audience a campaign buys in October reflects the race in October. The jobs audiences, the childcare cost audience, and the Persuade and GOTV audiences for the governor's race, the Senate race and four House races are all available for activation now through L2 DataMapping and in LiveRamp. For the Jocelyn Benson and John James campaigns, and for Abdul El-Sayed and Mike Rogers, these are the voters to reach on jobs before the debates on October 6 and 8.