On Nov. 5, voters didn’t just head to the polls to select their choice for president. Many also cast their votes on various policy issues, including whether and how to better fund their local child care systems. A number of the child care-related measures won.
What these successes prove, coming after other significant wins for the issue on the ballot in recent years, is that going straight to voters is a viable avenue for advocates seeking to secure more funding for child care, particularly with no action likely to come from the federal level anytime soon.
“One of the takeaways from this election is that voters want action on care,” said Melissa Boteach, vice president for child care/early learning at the National Women’s Law Center. “Voters want investments in child care and early education, and they are willing to raise the revenues to support those investments,” she said, pointing to evidence from a poll conducted by her organization in April 2024 that found that more than three-quarters of respondents support spending on those priorities and funding it through taxes on the wealthy and corporations.
The issue has become even more urgent as the significant funding that the child care sector received to keep providers’ doors open during the pandemic is now essentially gone. “That money is not there anymore,” Boteach noted. So local governments “have to figure out what they can do until we win federal dollars.”
Boteach pointed out that measures won in states with very different political climates, such as in California and Texas. “This is a really bipartisan issue,” she said. “It can win in red states and blue states.”
What It Took To Win
In Travis County, Texas, voters passed Proposition A, a measure to increase property taxes by 2.5 cents on every $100 of property value to raise more than $75 million. The money will create about 2,000 new child care slots and nearly 4,000 slots for older children in after school and summer camp, with the child care slots reserved for families earning 85 percent or less of the local median family income. After state lawmakers failed to approve a $2.3 billion proposal in 2023 to help child care providers stay afloat as federal aid was drying up, the Travis County Commissioners Court voted unanimously to put Proposition A on county voters’ ballots. It had the backing of local businesses and civic organizations, led by the United Way for Greater Austin and ultimately, voters approved it by 60 percent.
Voters in Sonoma County, California also opted to raise taxes to fund child care. They passed a 25 cent sales tax on every dollar spent, which is expected to generate $30 million a year. Sixty percent of that money will be spent on increasing access to child care and preschool for low-income families, raising wages for providers, and expanding or renovating child care facilities. The measure was a response to the loss of half of the area’s local child care slots during the pandemic and outcomes for young children declining over the last six years. It had no formal opposition, numerous local endorsements and more than $1 million in campaign funding. In the end it passed with 61 percent of the vote.
Meanwhile, voters in Washington State beat back an attempt to repeal a tax increase designated for supporting the child care system. Three years ago, the state’s lawmakers passed a bill that created a new 7 percent tax on capital gains income, or money made from things like stocks and bonds, of $262,000 or more. The first $500 million raised was earmarked for child care subsidies for families and bonuses for child care providers that offer care during nonstandard hours. What’s left over was meant for school construction. In 2023 the tax raised $848 million. Washington Initiative 2109, a measure that was bankrolled by hedge fund manager Brian Heywood and was on this November’s ballot, would have repealed that tax, but in the end 63 percent of voters shot it down.
That “shows that people don’t mind raising revenues and particularly asking the wealthy and large corporations to pay their fair share so that we can have investments in caregiving,” Boteach said.
There were also three measures that passed in Colorado counties that either raised or redirected revenues toward issues including child care.
Lessons Learned From a Failed Measure
Not every child care-related measure was successful this year. But there are important lessons to be learned from those that failed as well as those that passed. One interesting one to look at is a measure in St. Paul that would have increased property taxes by 0.006% each year for ten years to raise an estimated $2 million in the first year and $20 million by the tenth. That money would have made the cost of child care free for low-income families and, if there were extra funds, help defray the cost for higher-income ones.
Councilmember Rebecca Noecker, who led the ballot measure effort, had a 2-year-old and a 1-year-old when she took office in 2015. After researching local child care issues, she came up with the idea of a city fund to help families afford care. The child care system “is just broken, and there needs to be an injection of money into the system,” she explained.
But, she noted, given how expensive child care is, “If you’re going to make any meaningful impact on this problem you need to raise a significant amount of money.” Eventually she and other lawmakers landed on the idea of gradually raising property taxes to secure the substantial amount of money necessary to make a dent in the problem. The city council could vote to raise taxes to create the fund, but Noecker wanted “some form of voter mandate” so that the effort wouldn’t get derailed by politics, but in the end, that’s exactly what happened.
St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter vocally opposed the idea. The council had to override his veto to put it on the ballot, and once they did, he said he wasn’t going to enact the measure even if it was passed, arguing that the numbers didn’t add up. Noecker said that that wasn’t true and that “it was a completely funded mandate.”
Noecker thinks Carter’s opposition gave some voters who were hesitant about raising taxes “permission” to vote no, especially given that city voters may be experiencing “tax fatigue” after they approved a 1 percent increase in the sales tax in 2023 to pay for parks and streets. Noecker also pointed out that the ballot measures that were approved this cycle were on the county level, entities that are more likely to provide social services, which may have worked in their favor. “It was definitely an uphill battle to get people to see the possibility of a city taking a role around this,” she said.
But Noecker doesn’t think it’s impossible to win in the future. “A lot of cities are not successful on the first go round with these ballot initiatives,” she said. “So it’s very disappointing, [but] it’s not super surprising.” Supporters are currently talking about what might happen next; it’ll take some time to go back to the ballot, if that’s what they decide to do. But “it’s clear from campaign engagement we did that people absolutely see this as a need,” Noecker said. “The question revolves around what should the city do, county do, state do.”
“There’s no way we’re going away, because the problem is not going away,” she said.
This year’s successful measures come after other victories at the ballot for child care advocates in recent years. Voters in Multnomah County, Oregon, which includes Portland, voted in 2020 to increase taxes on wealthy families to raise $200 million to provide free preschool to all 3- and 4-year-olds while raising pay for providers. That same year, voters in Colorado approved an increase in taxes on nicotine products to fund universal pre-K, which has since enrolled more than 40,000 children. In 2022, New Mexico voters overwhelmingly passed a constitutional amendment that made their state the first to guarantee a right to early childhood education and also directed a large, steady stream of funding to it.
Even with these measures in place, there is still a need for significant federal investment in child care, Boteach said. Cities, counties and states are far more limited in how much money they can spend on the system. Still, she adds, ballot measures are “a tool in the toolbox to continue to build momentum and get real dollars into communities that are willing to vote for them.”
Bryce Covert is an independent journalist writing about the economy. She is a contributing op-ed writer at the New York Times and a contributing writer at The Nation. Her writing has appeared in Time Magazine, the Washington Post, New York Magazine, the New Republic, Slate, and others, and she won a 2016 Exceptional Merit in Media Award from the National Women’s Political Caucus. She has appeared on ABC, CBS, MSNBC, NPR, and other outlets. She was previously Economic Editor at ThinkProgress, Editor of the Roosevelt Institute’s Next New Deal blog, and a contributor at Forbes. She also worked as a financial reporter and head of the energy sector at mergermarket, an online newswire that is part of the Financial Times group.
