Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old progressive with a commanding lead in the New York City mayoral race, has placed universal child care at the center of his campaign, returning to it again and again as one of a few key policies that could redefine what City Hall delivers. He’s promising to make child care free for every New Yorker from 6 weeks to 5 years old, while raising child care workers’ wages to match public school teachers.
It’s easy to see why the city’s child care system needs reform. Families with children under 6 are leaving New York City at twice the rate of everyone else. More than 80 percent of families with young children can’t afford care that runs upward of $20,000 a year, and the flight of young families is costing the city an estimated $23 billion annually in lost economic productivity. “It’s not just parents with young children — child care and caregiving is also something that really affects grandparents and many older adults too,” said Louise Yeung, the policy director for Mandami’s campaign.
Still, it’s an unusual gamble, especially when most New Yorkers don’t have young children. Few would openly dispute that child care matters, but the harder question is whether a politician should stake their campaign on an issue that’s less salient to voters than it may initially seem.
Mamdani’s campaign builds on a fundamental shift in how Democrats have started to talk about child care over the last half-decade. After the pandemic, leaders began to talk about it less as a private concern that each family must figure out and more as essential “human infrastructure” — as important to society and the economy as new roads and bridges.
But what do voters say?
Ask Americans what they think about child care, and the numbers look formidable. But the sky-high numbers can be misleading.
What Americans think about child care
Nearly 75 percent of Americans say child care is too expensive, according to a July 2025 AP-NORC poll, and majorities across both parties support government action to make it more affordable. A 2023 survey by GQR and the Child Care for Every Family Network found that 73 percent of voters consider the child care system “fundamentally broken” and 84 percent see it as “economic infrastructure.”
But when pollsters ask voters to rank their priorities, child care plummets. Forthcoming polling from Searchlight Institute, a new liberal think tank, found just 6 percent of registered voters in seven battleground states consider child care their most important issue, and only 22 percent put it in their top three. Even among younger voters, it sits only in the middle of the pack — well below health care, housing, and inflation, according to data from Blue Rose Research, another Democratic polling firm.
“It’s easy to say you approve of a lot of stuff when you aren’t being required to choose between options,” said Charlotte Swasey, the director of analytics at Searchlight. “Generally, asking approval is a great way to get positive numbers towards anything respondents are vaguely okay with.”
That tension — between broad support and weak urgency — has long defined the politics of child care. As child care analyst Elliot Haspel has written, voter support for the issue is “butter soft” — strong enough to make politicians feel safe talking about it, but rarely strong enough to make them act. The pandemic made child care more salient — the glaring absence of it became everyone’s problem — but the urgency faded as offices reopened with blunt return-to-work mandates that assumed child care access had simply sorted itself out.
Blue Rose does find that even though child care is a lower priority for voters, Democrats have a “trust” advantage on it compared to Republicans. “Democrats benefit when they keep their focus on the issues that are most important to voters — the economy and health care,” Blue Rose’s director of research Ali Mortell told me. “Issues like child care, abortion, or climate change can color your language or add to a broader narrative, but it would be a strategic misstep to fixate a campaign narrative solely on any one of those.”
So what do we make of this? One lesson is that polling can guide a candidate, but only so much. In some ways Mamdani is doing exactly what campaign strategists would advise: packaging the issue inside a broader affordability crisis. When he talks about child care — and he talks about it often — it’s almost always in the same breath as rent freezes, free buses, and city-run grocery stores. On the other hand, he’s following his gut and not shying away from making child care truly central to his bid, even though there are other cost-of-living issues that affect more New Yorkers at any given moment.
Making child care an issue that voters rank more highly will probably require a mix of cultural tactics. For some, it might involve linking care shortages to anxiety over population decline. For others, it could mean investing more in memorable Hollywood characters who can help change narratives. As the 19th News recently reported, some care advocates are now pushing screenwriters and producers to treat child care the way they once treated drunk driving or LGBTQ+ representation — as an issue that can shift public attitudes through storytelling. Others say leaders may need to figure out how to reframe what child care is even about. As Kathryn Jezer-Morton put it at The Cut, “For affordable child care to be an interesting story for people living in individualistic cultures, it has to be about something other than children.”
In some ways, this is the same tension that sank the expanded Child Tax Credit. In 2021, the American Rescue Plan temporarily increased the credit and made monthly payments available to nearly all families with children, cutting child poverty in half almost overnight. But the policy never garnered the moral legitimacy of programs like Social Security or Medicare. It wasn’t “earned” through work requirements, and it wasn’t narrowly targeted — it sat uneasily between families viewed as “deserving” and “undeserving.” Once the emergency moment passed and the payments expired at the end of 2021, so did the political will to revive them.
Universal child care could fall into that same trap. It’s popular in theory, but voters don’t always resonate with the challenge, especially if they’re past the stage of needing it or never had kids at all. Mamdani’s bet is that by talking about child care as part of the city’s affordability crisis — not as a moral appeal or a benefit for parents — he can pull it out of that gray zone.
Whether that works depends on whether voters come to see the cost of raising kids as something that shapes the city’s future, not just individual family budgets. If Mamdani wins, it probably won’t be because New Yorkers felt sudden new sympathy for struggling parents. It will be because they saw their own survival in the same frame.
This work was supported by a grant from the Bainum Family Foundation. Vox Media had full discretion over the content of this reporting.
