How free childcare started winning US elections: ‘Overnight, people realized how essential it was’
The Guardian | July 29, 2026 | Sunny PatelIn a matter of weeks, Francesca Hong, an unlikely candidate for governor in one of the country’s most heated battleground states, will test a message that is at once radical and, to many, incredibly practical: the government should help pay for childcare.
“When we talk about free childcare, you can connect to folks whether it’s on an economic argument or just purely that it’s the right thing to do for our kids,” said Hong, a democratic socialist running in Wisconsin’s Democratic primary on 11 August. “I always like to remind folks: if we don’t take care of our kids, who’s going to take care of us?”
For 50 years, US childcare policy lived in the welfare drawer with programs such as Head Start, a free early learning initiative for low-income families, and subsidies focused on keeping poor mothers in the workforce. Anything broader was often shut down by conservatives advocating for families’ “personal choice” over government-run childcare. And while Democratic lawmakers, often women, campaigned on the need for affordable childcare – presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris made it central to their platforms – they had little success.
Then something shifted as the cost of care surpassed college tuition and a pandemic hangover pushed caregivers, and their wallets, to their limits: childcare became a middle-class problem that could no longer be ignored. In November, Zohran Mamdani made universal childcare a cornerstone of his New York mayoral campaign, and two centrists, Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill, won the governorships in Virginia and New Jersey, respectively, running on the same plank. In March, New Mexico became the first state to offer free childcare for all.
Can liberals even imagine any reason that parents don’t have 11 or 12 kids?
Or why non-parents should chip in?
