Good morning, rulers! I’m an intern for POLITICO magazine, but dropping-in today as your co-host. Nice to meet you all! (And thanks to Sophie Gardner for helping put this all together!) American lawmakers across the country are catching up on the hot issue they cannot afford to ignore any longer: unaffordable childcare. But instead of focusing on the corporate workplace, lawmakers are targeting a different kind of work environment: the campaign trail. Increasingly, state legislators are introducing bills that would allow campaign funds to be used for childcare. This year alone, lawmakers in Georgia, Nevada, Massachusetts, Arizona, Hawaii, Tennessee, Iowa, Oklahoma and Kansas have introduced such bills. At the end of February, Texas and Florida were the latest states to join them, introducing bills that allow candidates to use campaign funds for related child care expenses. This is an issue that Liuba Grechen Shirley knows all too well. In 2018, when she ran as a Democratic nominee in New York’s 2nd Congressional District against Republican Peter King, her children were three and one. She had recently left her position as a Director of the Research Institute at New York University, and was consulting from home as she never made it off the waitlist for daycare. When she quit consulting to run for Congress, she was faced with a problem: How to hit the campaign trail while caring for her very young children. So she petitioned the Federal Election Commission to allow her to spend campaign funds on childcare costs, making her the first in the country to do so. “When I put the request into the FEC, I was immediately told that I was crazy,” Grechen Shirley told Women Rule. “I was told that it was political suicide, that everyone would judge me for being a mom and a woman and for talking about it.” But she persisted, winning the support of Hillary Clinton and 24 members of Congress. Ultimately, the FEC ruled in her favor. Since then, at least 59 candidates, both male and female, running for federal office, have used campaign funds to cover the costs of childcare, according to Vote Mama Pac. Shirley lost her race, but her experience inspired her to form Vote Mama Pac in 2019, which supports Democratic women with young children as they run for office, providing them with financial support and mentoring. She also formed the Vote Mama Foundation, a nonpartisan research and advocacy nonprofit that seeks to erase the barriers women face when running for office; and Vote Mama Lobby, which pushes for family-friendly policies and “mama representation” among office holders. Her goal: to encourage state legislators to pass laws to allow the use of campaign funds for childcare in all 50 states. But it’s been a hard slog. Out of 28 states which allow or have allowed such use of campaign funds, only 16 have codified the practice into law. And even in states where campaign money has already been approved for childcare, some women are still reluctant to take advantage of those funds, according to Gretchen Shirley. “At the state level, there's still a lot of people who are afraid to use their campaign funds for childcare because they think that they will be criticized,” she said. “It's really difficult to get somebody who's a working class person to run for these positions, because not only are you running and it's incredibly difficult to cover the cost of childcare and your bills and you're not receiving a salary while you're running for office,” Grechen Shirley added. That’s something that Rep. Sara Jacobs (D - Calif.), an outspoken advocate for affordable childcare, has also observed. “Most events that you have to go to as a candidate are at nights or on weekends, and you're constantly doing events,” said Jacobs, who last month co-sponsored the Child Care for Every Community Act bill introduced by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Mikie Sherrill (D-N.J.). “If you don't have a childcare option then it makes it even more unattainable than it already is to run for office,” Jacobs said. As Gretchen Shirley sees it, the lack of representation of mothers of young children across all levels of the government is one of the reasons why the United States has been behind in public spending on childcare and paid family leave compared to other developed nations. A 2016 study found that in Congress, mothers of children under 18 introduce more bills than other Congresswomen, and their legislation often targets issues of childcare, paid family leave and children’s healthcare. Last year, a record number of women were nominated for governor and state legislature, and the 118th Congress has more women than ever before. Still, women with young children remain a minority in state offices, as they make up just 5.3 percent of state legislators, compared to 18 percent of mothers with children under 18 in the United States, compared to 18 percent of mothers with children under 18 in the United States, according to a report by Vote Mama Foundation — only 7 percent of the legislators are mothers with kids under 18. And that dearth of representation has real-life impact for American families, according to Gretchen Shirley. “If we want to change the policies that this country has, we have to change the policy makers,” Gretchen Shirley said. “We have more millionaires in Congress than moms. We have more senators named John than we have moms who have minor children in the Senate.”
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