Child Care Costs Are Swallowing Their Paychecks, and These Voters Want Solutions

Charlotte Randolph, the owner of a child care center on Milwaukee’s North Side, pinned a button to her chest that reads “I’m a Care Voter.” She laid out a spread of pizza and snacks outside, a draw for mothers and children in the neighborhood who were milling around the yard on a warm recent evening.

In the final days before the presidential election, Ms. Randolph said, she was determined to send women into the voting booth with one issue front and center: child care.

“They need quality child care and they need affordable child care,” Ms. Randolph said. “It should be on their minds and in their hearts when they go to the polls to vote.”

Child care is an overshadowed issue in presidential politics, dwarfed by talk of inflation, immigration, reproductive rights and foreign policy. But in battlegrounds like Wisconsin this year, concerns about the issue feel acute, and there’s an emerging sense that the candidates for president are no longer ignoring the role that child care can play in the lives of voters, especially women.

In the last major speech of her campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris said on Tuesday in Washington that she would work to make raising children more affordable for parents.

“I’ll fight for a child tax credit to save them some money, which will also lift American children out of poverty,” she said. “I will work to lower the cost of child care, which is out of reach for too many working families today.”