Definition
The Children Present Score indicates the likelihood of a respondent having one or more children under the age of 18 living at home. Individuals with higher scores are more likely to have one or more children under the age of 18 living at home.
Technical Details
The model was built from the following polling question:
Do you have any children under the age of 18 living at home?
- Yes
- No
- Don’t know/rather not say
Respondents who answered “Yes” are treated as the positive target class, indicating that they have one or more children under the age of 18 living at home. Respondents who answered “No” are treated as the negative target class. Responses of “Don’t know/rather not say” were excluded from modeling.
The Children Present Score was trained on polling data from the Winter 2025 Murmuration poll. We collected 8,002 responses online from registered voters in December 2025. The survey used stratified random sampling to ensure national representativeness across age, race, gender, partisanship, education and geography.
The model was trained using gradient-boosted decision trees. Model features were drawn from the Atlas by Murmuration dataset, which includes demographic (age, race, gender, etc.), commercial, geographic, and vote history information for all registered voters nationally, and from the American Community Survey (ACS) census data at the block group level.
Scores range from 0–100, where higher scores indicate greater likelihood that a voter has one or more children under the age of 18 living at home, and lower scores indicate a lower likelihood of having children under 18 in the household.
We validated the model's accuracy using a held-out set of 1,621 polling respondents (approximately 20% of the original survey sample) whose data was not used during model development. Among individuals with scores in the top 20% of the Children Present Score, 62% have one or more children under the age of 18 living at home–making them 185% more likely to have children in their household than the average voter.
Use Cases
- Persuasion (Education, Childcare, Cost of Living): Households with children are more likely to prioritize issues like public education, childcare costs, healthcare, and neighborhood safety, making them strong targets for persuasion messaging on these topics.
- How to use it: Target voters in the top 10–20% of the Children Present Score, then layer with a high turnout score at the level that matches your campaign (municipal, county, statewide, etc.) to focus on reliable voters. If your persuasion universe is defined by partisanship, optionally add a high Local or National Swing Voter Score to narrow voters open to changing their vote.
- Example: “Target Children Present 60+ and Local Voter 70+ to reach consistent voters in family households. If using a partisan persuasion universe, add Local Swing 50+.”
- GOTV (Family-Dense Areas): Households with children often have tighter schedules and benefit from earlier, clearer reminders. You can use this at the individual level to improve efficiency or at the precinct level to allocate resources geographically:
- Individual-level: Target voters with high Children Present + low-to-mid Turnout Score for direct GOTV contact.
- Precinct-level: Aggregate Children Present Score at the precinct level to Identify precincts with a high share of top-decile Children Present households and prioritize them for mail, paid media, and field staging locations.
- Coalition Building (School & Community-Based Partnerships): Use the score to identify neighborhoods where schools, youth programs, and family-centered institutions are natural organizing anchors.
- How to use it: Aggregate Children Present at the precinct level, then layer with ethnicity data to guide outreach to culturally specific community organizations.
- Example: “Prioritize precincts with high Children Present concentration and large Hispanic households for school-based coalition meetings.”
Targeting Table
The table below shows the score values associated with each decile to help you more easily target using the Children Present Score nationally. Note: these score cutoffs may be different in your local districts.
| To target the top... | Set the minimum score value as... |
| 10% | 63 |
| 20% | 50 |
| 30% | 39 |
| 40% | 29 |
| 50% | 21 |
| 60% | 13 |
| 70% | 7 |
| 80% | 5 |
| 90% | 2 |
| 100% | 1 |