[AnthonyMouse]

> Federally mandated parental leave (paternity and maternity leave) polls at about 80% in favor with the US adult population. This is regardless of political affiliation, by the way. Democrat and Republican voters both support it.

This sounds like the sort of thing where if you poll people yes/no, a majority of people support it, but then if you ask them whether they'll change their vote over it, the people who said yes say it's not their most important issue and they don't care about it enough to do anything. Whereas the people who said no are e.g. small business owners if you don't exempt them from it because they can't afford to pay someone for extended time off while simultaneously paying someone else to fill in for them, or large business owners if you do exempt the small businesses because they hate anything that gives smaller companies a relative advantage, and both of them will actually care if you try to do it and oppose the policy either way for fear that it might get changed during or after being enacted.

So then you have 80% wants x 1% cares vs. 20% wants x 75% cares and the second number ends up being bigger.

[throwaway173738]

Washington’s paid parental leave act has us put money into our Unemployment Insurance program in addition to the UI payments we already make. So the business owners don’t have to pay for it, they just have to allow it to happen.

[AnthonyMouse]

What percent of the original 80% who supported it still support it when you tell them they're the ones who will pay for it though? (They would have been either way, but that sort of thing tends to affect polling numbers.)