Janelle Bynum

An advocacy group hoping to expand support for child care and elder care plans to spend $50 million to back Democrats in congressional races, tying the costs of caregiving to the nation’s affordability debate.

The Campaign for a Family Friendly Economy, created a decade ago, aims to make caregiver issues more salient in elections. Its announcement came as the cost of child care continues to rise and as waiting lists for federal child care subsidies, which support working families in poverty, continue to grow.

Oregon has some of the nation’s highest costs for child care, and state-coordinated free preschool only reaches 28% of 4-year-olds, the 17th worst rate in the nation, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research.

Sondra Goldschein, executive director of the Family Friendly group and its political action committee, said child care and elder care are important to this year’s affordability conversation, especially as child care costs exceed what families pay for housing. Then there is the pressure on the “sandwich generation,” composed of middle-aged people who are caring simultaneously for their own children and parents.

One of Oregon’s two newest members of Congress, Rep. Janelle Bynum, heard exactly that message earlier this year when she assembled a panel of mostly young people at a West Linn library to hear their concerns. Her office chose constituents whom they knew might be concerned about child care -- but many cited the sky-high financial and logistical demands of caring for elderly family members as well.

“Taking care of your parents ... while trying to live your own life is really prominent for a lot of people,” Bynum said in an interview immediately after hearing from those constituents. “The care economy -- child care, elder care, multi-generational living -- ... these are the things affecting people’s everyday lives.”

A centrist-leaning Democrat who represents Oregon’s 5th Congressional District, which stretches from Clackamas County to Bend, Bynum is in sync with the national campaign’s message but was not cited by Goldschein’s group as a candidate they plan to boost this year.

Bynum is not expected to face serious headwinds in her campaign to be reelected to her seat, which she flipped to blue by defeating first-term Republican Lori Chavez DeRemer in 2024. Chavez DeRemer, who became President Donald Trump’s labor secretary, has since faced headwinds of her own.

Still, hers is expected to be the closest U.S. House race in Oregon this year, given the highly gerrymandered map that Democratic lawmakers created in 2021.

Goldschein echoed Bynum’s assertion that child care and elder care are driving concerns for many voters this year. “When child care can cost more than your rent or a mortgage, or you have to sacrifice a paycheck in order to be able to take care of a loved one,” that can motivate how people vote, she said. “Each election cycle, we see candidates recognizing that more and more.”

She hopes the message will resonate as families face a slew of rising costs, including climbing gas prices driven by a war in the Middle East that is unpopular with many voters.

The campaign plans to pour support for Democrats into Senate races in North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, Maine and Ohio and into House races in Iowa and Pennsylvania. It is also slated to dispatch volunteers to talk with voters about caregiving.

The National Republican Congressional Committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Republicans have begun to back child care as an issue crucial to growing the workforce, but their proposals tend to be less dramatic than those offered by Democrats. Last year, through President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, Republicans made an estimated 4 million more families eligible for a child care tax credit. The law also increased child care aid for military families and tax credits for employers who provide child care to their workers.

Oregon lawmakers similarly increased the state earned income tax credit that low-income working families with children can receive by roughly 50% in this year’s short session that wrapped up this month.

Before 2020, political candidates rarely spoke about child care. But the pandemic laid bare the child care industry’s precarity and necessity. Preschools and child care centers were pressed to stay open so parents in front-line jobs — such as those in health care — could return to work.

Then-President Joe Biden successfully persuaded Congress in 2021 to pass $39 billion in aid for child care, allowing states to offer support to more families and subsidizing wages for child care workers. Later that year, Biden sought to create nationwide universal prekindergarten and to vastly expand child care subsidies for families so that none would pay more than 7% of their household income for care. But the proposal narrowly failed in Congress. Since then, the pandemic aid has dried up, and families are feeling the pinch of rising costs.

Now, several candidates have centered their campaigns around child care affordability. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist who won election after pledging to make the city more affordable for middle-class residents, ran on universal child care. Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey and Gov. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia won elections after pledging to expand child care subsidies.

Some notable candidates are running on universal child care pledges this election cycle. They include Democrats Janeese Lewis George, who is running for mayor in Washington, D.C., and Francesca Hong, a gubernatorial candidate in Wisconsin. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, who is up for reelection this year, has pledged to support Mamdani’s ambitions and eventually to expand universal child care statewide.

Oregon is nowhere near to providing universal preschool for 4-year-olds, as California has managed to do, and it has thousands of families on its waitlist for subsidized child care for low-income working families.

In the one place where Oregon is explicitly trying to offer universal high quality early education for all 3- and 4-year-olds, Multnomah County, those efforts have hit various snags, including a shortage of providers. But the county’s Preschool for All program may get close to serving all families who want a seat by next school year.

Neither the White House nor the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees federal child care programs, responded to requests for comment about the high costs of child care and lack of available subsidies.

In his 2024 campaign, during an address to the Economic Club of New York, Trump said increasing foreign tariffs would “take care” of the expense of child care. That plan, thus far, has not materialized.

In Trump’s current term, the administration has largely focused on cracking down on fraud, after a viral video alleged Somali-run child care centers in Minneapolis were billing the government for children they weren’t caring for.

While there have been prosecutions stemming from child care subsidy fraud, the Minneapolis video’s central claims were disproven by state inspectors. Nonetheless, the Trump administration attempted to freeze child care funding for Minnesota and five other Democratic-led states until a court ordered the funding to be released.