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Mondaire Jones, winner of the Democratic primary in New York’s 17th Congressional District, successfully ran on the issue of universal child care.
Child care is a personal issue for Mondaire Jones. When he was growing up in Rockland County, New York, his mother couldn’t afford to send him to day care. Instead, he had to accompany his grandmother as she cleaned homes. “I don’t want any kid to have to go through what I went through when I was growing up,” Jones told me.
The issue proved to be a political winner for Jones, who was recently declared the victor in the Democratic primary for an open congressional seat in the suburbs north of New York City. He garnered two and a half times the votes of the next-closest candidate, setting him on the path to becoming the first openly gay Black member of Congress. Jones ran on a number of bold, progressive ideas that are also hotly debated, even within his own party: Medicare for All, a Green New Deal.
But universal child care “is one of the things that does not get any pushback at all,” he said with a laugh. He was the only candidate in the eight-way race to run on the issue, and he thinks it played a role in bringing people into his campaign and in his ultimate victory. “Everywhere I went, I connected the need for universal child care with my own lived experience,” he said. “That was a powerful aspect of my story.”
Child care has gotten some attention in the current presidential contest. Sen. Elizabeth Warren got out front during the primaries by releasing a comprehensive plan for a universal, public system, and Sen. Bernie Sanders also later called for free, full-time child care for all. A handful of other Democratic candidates said they supported the idea. Former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive nominee, released a plan last week that addresses the cost of child care. Even President Donald Trump proposed increasing child care tax deductions in 2016 and has called for a $1 billion investment since taking office.
But a number of Democrats vying to join Congress this year are going further than the remaining presidential hopefuls, explicitly running on universal child care. This includes Ihssane Leckey in Massachusetts, Rebecca Parson in Washington, Suraj Patel in New York, and Marie Newman in Illinois. They’re testing out whether a broad swath of voters can be motivated to turn out using this issue.
Thus far, it’s mostly proven to be a political winner. In mid-March, Newman beat long-term Illinois Rep. Dan Lipinski, one of the few anti-abortion Democrats remaining in the House, who has also in his career opposed the Affordable Care Act and a $15 minimum wage. Newman ran on a promise to enact universal child care if she got to Congress.
Illinois’s Third District is “filled with working moms,” Newman told me. And in each of the hundreds of meet-and-greets she’s done with voters, she said child care comes up “every single time.” She added, “I have not had one person say no, they don’t want that. Not one.”
In a recent poll conducted through YouGov by the People’s Policy Project, a think tank that advocates for universal child care, 57 percent of registered voters across the country supported the federal government giving school districts grants so they can provide free public child care. Democrats in particular love the idea—more than 80 percent are in favor, with over half strongly supporting it—but it bleeds across party lines. Over half of independents support it, and even 31 percent of Republicans are on board, including those who identify as very conservative, and even 29 percent of Trump voters. It also brings in disengaged voters: 61 percent of people who didn’t turn out in 2016 like the idea, as do 59 percent of those who didn’t vote in 2018.
It may not be hard to figure out why universal child care has such broad support. Among married American couples with children, 63 percent have two working parents; single parents are even more likely to be working. In turn, nearly eight million families pay someone to watch their children during the workday. It comes at a steep price: The annual cost of putting an infant in a day care center easily reaches the tens of thousands of dollars, outpacing what most families spend on housing, transportation, and food. Despite the political conversation over the high price of health care, child care is costing families a staggering four times as much.
These burdens only apply to those who are lucky enough to find a good place for their child to attend. Half of Americans live somewhere without any available child care spots. Of existing providers, fewer than 10 percent have been found to be high-quality.
The annual cost of putting an infant in a day care center easily reaches the tens of thousands of dollars, outpacing what most families spend on housing, transportation, and food.
The pandemic has only deepened the lack of reasonable child care options for families in America. Over 40 percent of child care centers have been shuttered during the crisis, and two out of five providers say they will close permanently without an infusion of government funding. The child care crisis could make it impossible for dual-income earners to return to their jobs and stunt the growth of the economy.
The enormous cost of child care “is a concern that I hear frequently from people in my district on the campaign trail,” Jones said. “It’s not surprising to me that a lot of candidates are running on it.”
“My district wants it,” Newman said bluntly of universal child care. “Everybody gets excited.” Something like the cost of child care is “part of everybody’s everyday,” she explained. “This is just super-practical stuff.”
It can even resonate in deeply red places. Child care was a core part of Heidi Sloan’s campaign in Texas’s 25th Congressional District, although she ultimately lost her primary. But the congressional district she ran in covers Austin as well as outlying, growing suburbs and some deeply rural counties. “I’ve had parents at doors tell me … that they’ve quit their jobs” because of child care, she told me. It’s not just an issue for suburban moms. Grandparents living in rural areas are providing care themselves and understand the untenable bind today’s families face. Students at the university told her they aren’t sure they’ll ever have children because the economics of raising a family are so uncertain.
Americans typically still see the struggle to afford raising children as an individual, not collective, problem. But “public child care is something that people get really excited about at their doors and events and in conversations,” Sloan said. Most had never considered the idea, but it didn’t “feel like some bizarre scheme,” she said. They saw it as an extension of the public school already provided to children ages five and up.
Not all Democrats are on board. Biden, the party’s presumptive nominee, recently released a comprehensive plan to address the country’s crisis of care. But while he called for universal preschool for children aged three and four, his child care solution amounts to federal assistance for building more child care centers alongside enhanced tax breaks and means-tested subsidies to make it more affordable.
Jones thinks he could go further. “I think Vice President Biden is trying, but he needs some encouragement to move further, frankly, into mainstream political thought,” he said. Universal policies “are more efficient and they enjoy greater support among the American people. They cannot be vilified as a sort of handout.”
Americans typically still see the struggle to afford raising children as an individual, not collective, problem.
Indeed, research has found that universal public-benefit programs around the world enjoy more political sustainability. It’s why President Franklin D. Roosevelt designed Social Security so that everyone pays in and everyone can claim benefits: so that “no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.”
Newman added that “the Democratic premise is that we make the economy more fair. We’re getting back to our roots … of creating a strong economy for everyone.” Universal child care has to be baked into that project. “I think it should be part of any economic platform that a Democrat runs on.”
Sloan thinks it’s an issue that can reach disengaged working-class voters, people who have never voted at all, for whom “politics is not addressing the needs of their everyday lives,” she said. She even thinks it could speak to disaffected Republicans who want their lawmakers to address kitchen-table concerns. Child care is the issue “that we put front and center,” Sloan said. “And it holds the door open.” It makes voters think, “Oh, politics can be about my everyday life.”
