"But I just don't think people realized what a big deal closing school for a year was."

Top Democrats, including President Joe Biden, are attuned to the central role that voters' reactions to pandemic policies could play in the November midterm elections.

Schools should stay open," Biden said in a news conference last week.

His White House has also tried to contrast the broad reality of schools being open now with the closures that took place late during the pandemic's first year under the Trump administration.

"Almost 60% of the schools were closed when we took office.

Now 96% of schools are open," top White House aide Cedric Richmond, a former Louisiana congressman, said in a recent livestreamed interview with The Washington Post.

'We need help'

Still, the politics around the pandemic and schools are complicated, and some Democratic voters remain willing to give the party the benefit of the doubt.

Katie Paris, a mother of two young children from Shaker Heights, Ohio, and the founder of the pro-Democratic group Red Wine & Blue, which organizes suburban women, and a group of her organization's members said Democrats should be more vocal about the party's support for measures like paid leave and universal child care that would have helped families over the last two years.

"I think the pandemic just identified: We need help."

Red Wine & Blue participated in the Biden administration's first-ever "White House Covid-19 Parent Check Up" last week.

Paris said Democrats should "say that we want to keep our schools open, then make sure that parents and teachers have all the support they need ...