Allow the use of campaign funds for childcare

For a state that prides itself on social progressivism, Massachusetts is severely lagging on its support for working parents running for office.

Nicole Coakley is a single mother of five from Springfield who works full-time as a therapist. Since 2022, she’s run twice, unsuccessfully, for Springfield City Council.

One of Coakley’s challenges while campaigning was how to care for her youngest daughter, now five. Her older kids were busy with sports and activities, but the youngest needed to be picked up from day care, fed, and watched. With a $54,000 annual salary, Coakley couldn’t afford extra babysitting on top of day care. Often, Coakley took her daughter to meet with constituents, but her daughter would be tired and vying for attention, limiting Coakley’s ability to campaign.

“If I was able to use my campaign funding, I could pay someone to watch my daughter until I was done campaigning for the night,” Coakley said.

For a state that prides itself on social progressivism, Massachusetts is severely lagging on its support for working parents running for office. In 2018, the Federal Election Commission ruled that candidates for federal office could use campaign funds to pay for childcare expenses incurred as a direct result of campaign activity. Thirty states — with politics as diverse as Alabama and California — let candidates for state or local office use campaign funds for childcare. Massachusetts, shockingly, does not.

Legislation has been introduced each session since 2017 to let state and local candidates use money from their campaign accounts to pay for childcare. There is no organized opposition to the legislation, and the Senate has passed it twice. It appears to simply not have risen to the top of the House’s priority list. This year, an election year, is the right time to change that.

The policy is not about public money, but about how political candidates can use the private funds they raise for their campaign committees. Under campaign finance laws, candidates can use that money to buy a dress for a campaign gala, membership at the UMass Club, office furniture, or donuts for staff — but not to pay a babysitter during a voter forum.

State Representative Kate Lipper-Garabedian, who had two young children when she ran her first campaign for state representative in 2020, said she and her husband paid for babysitters out of pocket. If she could have used campaign funds, Lipper-Garabedian said, “It would not only have been a logistical help and a financial help for me, I think it also would have said the ecosystem of encouraging people to run for office is made for you as well, that we recognize that you have value being a mother of young children.”

One reason to allow the use of campaign funds for childcare is to diversify politics by removing a barrier to running for office for parents of young children. Advocates say it is most likely to affect women, who often take on a bigger share of child-rearing duties than men, and candidates of color, who are less likely to have the wealth to pay for childcare. In Massachusetts, only 4 percent of Massachusetts legislators in 2022 were mothers with minor children, according to the bill’s advocates. But it will help parents of all genders and races, especially single parents.

On Tuesday, the Vote Mama Foundation, an advocacy group working to legalize the use of campaign funds for childcare nationwide, released a report looking at candidate spending on childcare between 2018 and 2022 in federal elections and in 13 states that allow the expenditures and have accessible campaign finance databases. It identified 68 candidates for federal office, both Democrats and Republicans, who spent $717,000 on childcare. More than half those federal candidates (56 percent) were women and just under half (47 percent) were candidates of color. On a state level, 87 candidates spent nearly $300,000 on childcare. Sixty percent of state and local candidates who used money for childcare were women and 32 percent were people of color.

In 2020, a legislatively established Special Commission on Family Care and Child Care Services recommended that Massachusetts allow campaign expenditures for childcare needs using similar guidelines as for other spending: that the money go only to childcare that is necessary because of a candidate’s campaign activities, and it cannot be drawn upon for personal use.

Passing the bill would not be a panacea that would open the floodgates to diverse candidates. Candidates would still need to fundraise enough to pay for childcare in addition to their other campaign expenses, and the cost of childcare is only one barrier many candidates face. But it is a common-sense policy that will make it a little easier for parents of young children to run.

As state Representative Joan Meschino, a bill sponsor, said, “If we want a more diverse legislative body, then we need a more diverse candidate pool. We have to be thoughtful and intentional about the systems we put in place that will bring us those results.”