In our broken political system, running for office is the longest job interview you’ll ever have. If you run for Congress, you give up two years of your life, work 24/7, and forgo your salary. Candidates who aren’t independently wealthy—the people we most need representing us—are often taking out second mortgages, emptying their retirement accounts, or maxing out their credit cards just for a chance to represent their communities.

Think about who can succeed in this system:

• People who have the means to do unpaid work for two years

• People whose kids are adults, so they don’t need childcare

• Men, who have wives at home to take care of their kids and their house

Is that the kind of legislature that best represents us? One that is richer, older, and more male than the general American population?

To get universal affordable childcare for everyone, we need to break the cycle. We need moms seated at the decision-making table, not just advocating from the outside hoping that politicians will listen. We need them on the inside as well, but to do that, we need to break the structural barriers that keep moms out of office and out of power.

That’s where Campaign Funds for Childcare (CFCC) comes in. This policy allows parents to use their privately raised campaign dollars to pay for childcare while they are campaigning, at no cost to taxpayers. It helps level the playing field, so we get more moms in office to deliver paid leave, universal childcare, and so much more.

I got CFCC authorized at the federal level when I ran for Congress in 2018. I can still remember doing call time back then, holding my 1-year-old in one arm and dialing with my other hand, all while my 3-year-old daughter put way too many hair clips into my hair. I became the first woman in history to receive approval from the Federal Elections Commission to use CFCC, a decision that is still cited when federal candidates use CFCC now.

To date, 40 states and DC have also authorized CFCC for state and local candidates, thanks to the efforts of Vote Mama Lobby. In 2025, state legislatures enacted 29,000 new laws, compared to fewer than 40 new laws passed by Congress. If we actually want to make life better for families, we have to improve our representation in state legislatures.

New data from Vote Mama Foundation shows that CFCC is making a difference. The research found that state and local candidates have collectively spent over $700,000 on CFCC between 2018 and 2025, with spending increasing by over 1400% in that seven-year period. More and more parents—moms and dads—are using CFCC to be able to run for office.

If we look at the demographics of candidates using CFCC, it shows exactly how this policy can transform the political system. Nearly 60% of CFCC users were women, and of the Top 10 spenders, eight were candidates of color, and seven were women.

But if we dig one level deeper into the data, we can also see where there’s still progress to be made. While women made up a majority of the candidates using CFCC, a majority of the funds were spent by men. There are a few possible explanations:

• A lot of candidates still don’t know about CFCC. Campaign finance is complicated enough. Moms of young kids may not think to ask about CFCC because they just assume that running for office will bankrupt them.

• There’s still a stigma against women using CFCC. When I was running for Congress, people told me it was political suicide to use CFCC. There’s a cultural expectation in our patriarchal society that women should do the child rearing. As a result, women aren’t as comfortable using CFCC.

• In general, it’s harder for women candidates to fundraise huge sums of money. This is because men typically donate more to men, while women donate more to women—but there are more male donors in the political ecosystem and they give more money. When women candidates have fewer campaign dollars, they have to stretch those limited resources further to be able to win.

We can fix these problems by educating the public generally about CFCC and why it’s important, and normalizing moms serving at every level of government.

To be clear, CFCC alone will not erase sexism from politics. But in a political system that already throws up so many hurdles to everyday people, especially parents, running and serving, there are a lot of barriers we have to break to make government fully representative.

CFCC moves us in the right direction, and given that Vote Mama Foundation has identified that we’d need to elect 763 more moms of minor children to state legislatures to reach full mamas’ representation, we need all the help we can get.

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To spare you the rage bait, here are some of the craziest highlights.

Moms.gov advertises Crisis Pregnancy Centers: non-medical facilities that are really just fronts for anti-abortion propaganda. They exist not to provide healthcare, but to scare women away from abortion and falsely promote adoption as an alternative. A 2014 study found that 4 in 5 of these scam centers provided at least one piece of wrong or misleading medical information, including false links between abortion and mental health, infertility, and breast cancer. As if that’s not bad enough, they aren’t covered under HIPAA, which means they’re not legally required to protect patient privacy.

Moms.gov has an entire section about prescription drugs with a gold eagle holding a TrumpRx banner that makes me physically ill. It states that “America was being overcharged for medicine. The same drugs, made in the same factories, at the same dosages, are costing Americans up to 1000% more than in any other country.” You don’t say? We had no idea! In reality, many Democrats have been saying this for years, and it was Congressional Republicans who tried to prevent Medicare from negotiating drug prices. (I won’t even get into how TrumpRx is a literal ripoff of GoodRx, with the same exact prices, as if Trump is a magician who used his super negotiating skills to get naive Americans cheap drugs.)

Moms.gov discourages moms from using Tylenol while pregnant, echoing RFK Jr.’s misinformation that there’s a link between the use of prenatal acetaminophen (the generic name for Tylenol) and autism. What’s the point of this medically inaccurate information? To take away the only safe pain relief and fever reducer for pregnant women. The subliminal message to mothers, from before their kid even leaves the womb, is that in order to have a healthy family, they must intentionally sacrifice their well-being.

All these lies are outrageous, but what’s missing from the website is even more telling.

Moms.gov has no mention of IVF, but it does blame birth control and women’s weight for infertility. The section titled “Looking to start a family” conveniently leaves out the fact that it was Republican Senators who blocked the Right to IVF Act in 2024.

While the website mentions that women should breastfeed for at least the first six months, it doesn’t acknowledge the fact that 1 in 4 American women go back to work just ten days after giving birth. It takes approximately 12 weeks for us to establish our milk supply. The best way to do that is to nurse our babies on demand, and that is physically impossible without paid family leave. Meanwhile, it is easier for babies to get milk from a bottle, and some turn down the breast once bottle-feeding is established. But many women are not guaranteed breaks during their workday in order to pump milk for their children. These are all the result of policy choices. Our government is guilting women for “failing” at breastfeeding, when the reality is that this is a blatant policy failure orchestrated by Republicans!

This website literally says, “Breastfeeding saves lives, money, and time.” I’m a huge proponent of nursing, don’t get me wrong. I nursed all three of my children for many years, but it most certainly does NOT save time. This is laughable and clearly written by a man! One woman commented on Instagram, “I AM FULLY TRIGGERED. It was the longest bout of unpaid physical labor of my entire life!” I feel that fully.

Nursing absolutely does save money though. I will give them that, because formula is irrationally expensive. Formula can cost approximately $100 to $150 each month. Someone working full-time at minimum wage would expect to earn $1,250 each month before tax, which means that formula for one child could take 12% of a person’s pre-tax income—not even including the cost of bottles and nipples. Oh look, another problem that could be solved with better policies, but the Trump administration just wants to blame women instead of doing something about it.

This entire new website, this co-option of American motherhood, this deception is hard for me to watch. Trump is spending a billion dollars a day to bomb Iran, a billion dollars on a ballroom, and giving billionaires massive tax cuts at the expense of working-class Americans, all while peddling right-wing propaganda and conspiracies, and claiming that it’s really the DEI policies that are harming American families.

But while I sit here raging at the Republicans, I’m mad at my side as well. I’m mad that the Democrats didn’t create a Moms.gov website first and fill it with real medical and policy information. I’m mad that the Democrats failed to deliver paid leave, universal childcare, and other pro-family policies, even when we controlled the House, the Senate, and the White House.

Democratic moms are the answer. They bring not just the right policy positions, but the right priorities, because they understand that pro-family policies boost our entire economy. If Democratic moms were in charge, our government would focus on changing policy to make it easier and more affordable for Americans to start and grow their families, instead of blaming women for our country’s declining birth rates. The truth is that Americans aren’t having more kids because policymakers make motherhood in this country expensive, complicated, and overly difficult—when it doesn’t have to be.

Let me paint you a picture of what we could have on a Moms.gov site if we had people in charge who live this daily. It would teach new moms about the resources our government provides to support them, rather than just providing lip service and peddling lies. It would explain that childbirth is free, childcare is universal, parental leave is paid and job-protected, and school meals are provided at no cost to families. (None of this is true of course—right now—but we’re going to fight like hell to make sure the U.S. catches up to the rest of the industrialized world.)

That starts with electing Democratic moms to every level of government.

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Ahead of this year’s Mother’s Day, I want to share this essay from one of our mamas, Kesha Ram Hinsdale, who serves as Majority Leader of the Vermont Senate while raising a 3-year-old and a 20-month-old. Her words resonated so much with my experience of motherhood, and they show why lived experience matters so much in our elected representatives. I hope you’ll give it a read.

– Liuba

What mothers make possible

By Kesha Ram Hinsdale

Everywhere I go, people ask me the same question: How do you serve as Majority Leader of the Vermont Senate with a three-year-old and a twenty-month-old at home?

It’s a fair question. But I often find myself wondering something else entirely: How does any mother do it?

Because the truth is, I have advantages most mothers don’t. I have a partner. I have family nearby. I have a job that, while demanding, comes with a level of autonomy and support that too few women ever experience. And I have a title—Majority Leader—that makes people assume I must be uniquely capable.

I’m not.

What I am is surrounded by care. And what I know, deeply, is that if more mothers were given real support, real opportunity, and real trust, they would lead in every space we’ve told them they can’t.

I think about my own mother a lot this time of year.

She was a single mom raising three kids, working tirelessly just to make rent. When I was in elementary school, I became Student Council President—a big deal in my young mind. Years later, after I had been elected to the legislature at 22, I was invited back to speak at that same school. My mother came to watch me. Somewhere in the conversation that followed, she admitted she hadn’t ever known I was Student Council President.

At first, I was surprised. Then I understood.

She had been carrying so much—financial stress, long hours, the constant mental math of how to make everything work—that there were pieces of my childhood she simply couldn’t hold onto. And yet, I never felt that absence. She had shielded me from the weight of it.

Looking back, I can see all the people who helped carry me forward when she couldn’t be everywhere at once. The vice principal who drove me to School Board meetings. The Parks and Recreation afterschool staff who listened patiently as I practiced my speeches. They formed a quiet, informal network of support around a kid with big ideas and a mother doing everything she could.

That’s what made my path possible. Not just individual grit, but shared responsibility.

Today, my mother’s life looks different. There is far more stability. More time. And she is there for me in ways that feel like both a gift and a full-circle moment.

When I was asked to consider serving as Majority Leader, I didn’t start with ambition. I started with logistics. Would my kids be fed on time? Would this role add more to the already relentless mental load that comes with parenting?

I first said in my mind and then aloud to my mother: I can only do this if you can make dinner for the family three nights a week.

She said yes. And that made all the difference.

And now, on the hardest days—after hours of debate, decisions, and the weight of leading a Senate caucus—I walk through the door to the smell of a home-cooked meal. I hear laughter. I see my children already at the table, and they shout “Mommy!” as I come in.

There is no title that compares to that moment.

We talk a lot in this country about supporting families, but too often we mean it in the abstract. If we are serious about it, we need to make real economic changes—affordable housing that allows for multigenerational living, childcare that doesn’t consume a paycheck, workplace policies that recognize caregiving as essential, not peripheral.

But there’s something deeper, too. A shift in how we define leadership and success.

In my twenties, I was in a hurry. I wanted to be someone. I worried about whether I would be remembered, and for what. That urgency is familiar to many young leaders, especially women, who feel they have to prove themselves quickly and completely.

Motherhood changed that.

Now, I’m less focused on being someone and more focused on doing something. I think less about how I’ll be remembered in the headlines and more about how I’ll be remembered by my children. I think about what they see when they watch me lead—how I treat people, how I handle pressure, how I balance conviction with compassion.

It’s a quieter ambition, but a more enduring one.

We need to stop asking mothers how they “do it all,” as if the goal is to carry an impossible load alone. We need to stop measuring success by how well women contort themselves to meet expectations that were never designed with them in mind.

Instead, we should be asking: What would it look like if we built a world where mothers didn’t have to do it alone?

Because when we do that—when we build systems, communities, and cultures that actually support caregiving—we don’t just make life better for mothers. We make leadership stronger, more grounded, and more reflective of the world it serves.

My story isn’t exceptional. It’s a testament to what’s possible when care is shared.

This Mother’s Day, I’m thinking about the women who made space for me—my mother, first and foremost, but also the educators, caregivers, and community members who stepped in when she couldn’t.

And I’m thinking about what we owe the next generation of mothers.

Not admiration for doing the impossible.

But a commitment to finally make it possible.

I just got back from California, where we had a few Vote Mama fundraisers. A sentence I wouldn’t have been able to write if I were currently a candidate. Why? Because we tell candidates not to talk about out of district fundraisers. It’s a bad look—even though if you want any chance in hell of winning, you realistically need to travel to raise money in most cases. (The average House member in a competitive seat raises over $10,000 per day for two years, then does it all over again.)

I landed in San Diego, turned my phone on, and saw the following text from one of our mamas: “I feel like my mom-guilt is becoming overwhelming. I am gone ALL OF THE TIME. It’s the combination of out-of-state fundraising and in-district political events.” That text from a friend brought back so many memories of missing my kids, of wanting to be home to snuggle them to sleep, but knowing I was on the road, trying so hard to raise the money to win that seat, so that I could vote to improve their lives and the lives of kids across the country. It’s a catch-22. Fight for our kids, but give up our time with them. The dilemma of running for Congress in America as a mom.

It’s hard, but it really shouldn’t be this hard. Our system demands that candidates run for two years, raise millions of dollars, work around the clock, and give up our private lives for a chance to serve. It’s not like that in other democracies. Add on top of that the extra scrutiny our patriarchal society places on moms, even from our supposed allies, and we see why families don’t have a seat at the table.

Another one of our mamas, Rebecca Bennett, who’s running in NJ-07, received a text from a supporter that advised her to “reconsider mentioning being a mother of two young children.” The supporter went on to tell her to focus on her degree from Cornell Engineering, her MBA from Penn, and her military service, but not on being a parent, because she worried about her two young girls who will “have to live most of their childhoods without their mother.” I can assure you no one has ever said anything like that to any man running for office.

Lauren Babb Tomlinson, our mama who’s running in CA-06, spoke at a League of Women Voters’ forum last week, and someone involved in the event told her that she shouldn’t be there, that she should in fact be home with her one-year old. I asked Lauren how she responded, and she simply said, “Yep, I’ll see him at bedtime after this.”

The mom-guilt heaped on these women from outsiders is unfair, but the mom-guilt we bring on ourselves can be crippling.

When I ran, someone said they had never seen a candidate “use her children more,” they had never seen a candidate “take her children with her” as much as I did. There were a few reasons they were always with me: (1) I was nursing both of them still; (2) For the first six months of my campaign, I didn’t have childcare until my mom was done teaching at 3:30pm every day; and (3) I missed my babies and wanted to spend as much time with them as humanly possible. Of course I was judged for that. (I was also judged for my clothing, my hair, my make-up, and my girly voice. Alas, the life of any female candidate.)

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what we give up to run for office. I’ve been talking to our mamas across the country. I know what they’re going through right now, as they head into primaries. I remember the exhaustion and the excitement, the overthinking every word and every action.

When people who love politics start talking about candidates, there can be a weird trading baseball or Pokémon card detachment that takes over. I’m not sure I can even explain this—but we immediately start asking questions. What’s the PVI of the district? What’s their win number? How much have they raised? How many doors have they knocked? Who’s endorsed? What about labor? Are they taking corporate PAC money? And so on and so on. The questions are endless.

It’s easy to forget that these are all real people, and in the case of our candidates, mamas of young kids just trying to juggle it all. Trying to show up for our babies’ soccer and baseball games, their dance recitals, and their singing performances, at the same time we’re trying to raise millions of dollars, talk to hundreds of thousands of people, and show up for our community.

No one said running for office is easy, and if you’re doing it for the right reasons, it’s truly a labor of love. There is a lot we give up to run, but candidates should never have to give up their humanity.

Our broken campaign finance system and pace of campaigning already throw up enough roadblocks to everyday people running and serving. We don’t need the mom-guilt—from ourselves or others—putting the decision-making table even further out of reach.

Fourteen years ago, before I became a mother, I read an article Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote in The Atlantic, called “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” She had recently stepped down from her position as the first woman Director of Policy Planning for the State Department. Anne-Marie called it a “foreign-policy dream job,” yet chose to leave Washington because she had two teenage sons at home in Princeton who needed her.

She explained it was “hard to do the kind of job [she] wanted to do as a high government official and be the kind of parent [she] wanted to be, at a demanding time for [her] children,” and she wrote of women who were worried that she was sending a “terrible signal to younger generations of women.” She hadn’t quit her career—she was still teaching, writing, giving speeches, and appearing on television and radio regularly—but the simple acknowledgement of not being able to “have it all” was taboo. This article stuck with me for years, so much so that I quoted it to Anne-Marie when I met her more than a decade later at a Women’s History event at the White House.

Flash forward to 2026, and we’re in the middle of a heated culture war, a battle for which political party owns American motherhood. This is not new. It’s been going on for decades, dating back to the 1960s, when conservatives warned that childcare was “a communist plot to destroy the traditional family.” In 1971, Nixon vetoed a wildly popular bipartisan bill to address the cost of childcare because of “family-weakening implications.”

Today’s GOP network is investing millions of dollars into building an extensive ecosystem of conservative influencers. Tradwives are glamorizing a time when moms stayed home. Well-paid influencers are telling women that feminism has failed them. They all conveniently ignore the 1950s realities that men could legally rape their wives, women could not open bank accounts without their husband’s or father’s permission, they could not access birth control, and no-fault divorce didn’t exist.

Alex Clark, Turning Point USA’s Culture Apothecary podcaster said, “If we want to win the culture war, we have to start at home with the women—the real change makers, the culture shifters, the ones who hold the key to revitalizing the American family and therefore our nation.” Here’s how Turning Point USA describes the role of this conservative pop culture show: “Politics is always downstream from culture, and if we can reach people where they’re at culturally—that’s how we influence our nation.” This is the old Andrew Breitbart mantra—the belief that shaping cultural narratives changes political outcomes.

But what if it’s the opposite? What if it’s the political system that is in fact shaping the cultural outcomes, that is actually pitting liberal and conservative moms against each other and creating these culture wars?

The political system that was designed for wealthy, white, landowning men, at a time when women didn’t have the right to vote. The system that gatekeeps regular people from running for Congress, because working class Americans can’t give up two years of their lives, of their salary, to work around the clock and raise millions of dollars just for a chance to represent their communities. The system that makes it nearly impossible for parents to sustainably serve even if they do win, restricting new moms from voting by proxy, so that they have to fly cross-country with their newborns to cast votes. The system that requires members to spend the majority of their time in D.C. away from their families and calls votes in the middle of the night.

Who benefits from these mommy culture wars, from forcing women to pick a side between the “stay at home” camp and the “have it all” camp?

The political elite. The same political elites who are now trying their damndest to take away women’s right to vote through legislation such as the SAVE Act—because they don’t want to talk about the structural failures specifically designed to uphold the patriarchy, much less take action to fix the policies that fail women and children. The U.S. is the only industrialized country without paid maternity leave or subsidized quality childcare, even though there is widespread support among Americans: 88% of Democrats and 84% of Republicans support paid leave.

Instead, those political elites want us to point our fingers at each other. Erika Kirk recently told a room full of young women, “Before I met Charlie, I had my own company and I still do, but I built it in way where that when I got married and had children, it could run on its own. [...] That’s a beautiful thing, is like women in here, if you do create a company or a business and you’re an entrepreneur, build it in a way that it sustains itself, so that when you do find your husband, and you have children, family, that’s your main focus. You can have your calling on the side of your company.”

Let me repeat that: “You can have your calling on the side of your company.” As a woman who has built an organization from the ground up, while raising three children, I can assure you that what Erika is feeding young conservative women is a load of crap. The only reason I was able to build a multi-million dollar national organization, is because my mother is thankfully retired and is my full-time childcare. Without her support, Vote Mama wouldn’t exist.

The truth is that our country’s policy failure—our lack of paid leave and universal childcare—takes choice away from moms deciding what is best for our families. There are so many shared experiences of motherhood, yet we are forced into a false binary that liberal moms always prioritize our careers over our kids and conservative moms only want to stay home. In reality, there are many liberal moms who want to stay home with our babies and many conservative moms who want to work outside of the house.

The debate between staying at home and having it all isn’t a cultural phenomenon at all. It’s a manufactured political problem, purposely orchestrated to cover up for politicians who stand to benefit from everyday moms fighting each other, instead of fighting a system designed to keep women down and men in power.

My anxiety was particularly high this rainy Monday morning as masked ICE agents are being deployed to airports across the country. Last night, I couldn’t sleep thinking about the multiple flights I have coming up—thinking about the ICE agents who have never been trained in aviation security and don’t know how to detect bombs or threats as TSA agents do. ICE agents have murdered American citizens in the street and terrorized communities across the country, but we will now pay them to manage security at airports while TSA agents work for free, because Republicans insist on playing political games with our safety and lives. What could possibly go wrong?

Yesterday, I was doom scrolling the news, and my dear friend Jaime texted me: “Maybe we put it down. Maybe we take a little care of our brains and hearts.” I tried. I watched Netflix to numb my mind, but then I looked at the news again only to see that LaGuardia Airport was shut down because a plane had collided with a fire truck on the runway. Two pilots were killed, a flight attendant was ejected from the plane, and many people were injured.

This morning, I was making my kids breakfast, and I suggested to my daughter that maybe we drive to Ohio instead. She’s competing in the Great Middle School History Challenge and made nationals. We are both super excited, but now all I can think is I don’t want my baby anywhere near ICE agents. They pull guns on civilians.

I was cutting fruit for their lunch boxes talking about Thomas Fugate, the 23-year-old former landscaper and grocery store clerk who leads Homeland Security’s Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships—the child with no national security experience in charge of preventing terrorism. My daughter looked up and said, “Wait, you mean he’s only twice my age? How is that possible?” Exactly, kid.

Every friend I talk to has this feeling of dread. We are at war. We are spending more than a billion dollars a day to attack Iran, while Republicans claim that we have no money for healthcare, education, childcare, paid leave, school lunch programs, cancer research, or anything that would actually help humanity.

It’s a weird time to be a parent. It’s a weird time to work in politics. To do my job, I cannot spiral. I must maintain hope. I lead an organization—an incredible team that is fighting to take back the House and the Senate in November, so that we can put a stop to this madness—so that we can hold the criminal-in-charge accountable. We have endorsed more than 100 candidates running from school board to U.S. Senate, and we’ve got work to do.

But how do we maintain hope in this moment? Community. I’ll be honest with you: I’m usually the first person to roll my eyes when people talk about “being in community.” It usually seems a little hokey to me, but we launched this new program, Moms Night Out, an easy way to help moms (or anyone really) build their community AND their political power. In less than three months, over 150 moms across the country have given through Moms Nights Out—with more than 60% of them giving to Vote Mama for the first time ever.

This Friday, I hosted my own Moms Night Out: 12 mama friends and one awesome 23-year-old former campaign volunteer of mine showed up. We ate dinner; we talked politics; we talked about our kids and the state of the world; we raised $2,300 for our Mama Fund (dollars that go directly to our Vote Mama candidates’ campaigns); and we heard from my friend and Vote Mama candidate Kathryn Casey Quigley. She is running for Democratic County Chair in Suffolk County on Long Island to replace a corrupt 26-year incumbent who is keeping the Democrats from building real infrastructure and—you guessed it—community out here. Honestly, Friday night was exactly what I needed. It gave me hope, and those were the same friends talking me down from my current state of anxiety. It turns out that building community and raising political dollars to flip seats is exactly how we get through this moment.

And why does it matter that we flip seats? Because when we elect Democratic moms, good things happen. I started this morning writing about the things that scare me, and I’m going to finish with something that makes me happy.

Virginia is soon going to become the 14th state and the first southern state to have paid leave. The General Assembly passed paid leave in 2024 and 2025, but it was vetoed by the Republican governor. This year, because we elected Virginia’s first-ever woman and mama governor, Abigail Spanberger, and because we secured a Democratic majority in the House of Delegates, with 9 of 13 flipped seats being Vote Mama moms, Virginians are going to have paid leave.

Things are bleak right now, but they don’t have to be. They won’t be if we organize in our communities and elect Democratic moms to the highest levels of leadership.

This afternoon, I spoke with Rep. Ayanna Pressley about Vote Mama endorsing her for re-election. She calls herself a bonus mom. She helped raise her stepdaughter since she was two, and we talked about her work on reproductive freedom and childhood trauma. As we are bombarded with videos of people like Kristi Noem, Markwayne Mullin, and Pete Hegseth showing an absolute lack of humanity in everything they say and do, hearing from an intelligent, empathetic, caring woman who is serving in Congress for the right reasons is exactly what I needed.

After my chat with Ayanna, I texted my same friend Jaime about how much better I felt. She replied: “I am so happy you’re feeling better bc I’m not kidding when you feel better I start to feel better. It cascades.”

It cascades. It really does.

There’s something eerie—almost planned—about the fact that Usha Vance, Karoline Leavitt, and Katie Miller (wife of White House ghoul Stephen Miller) are pregnant at the same time.

Eerie, but not completely surprising.

The right’s version of motherhood is central to their political ideology. It is not only an identity, but a weapon to advance their agenda. If conservatives don’t like something—vaccines, books, the fundamental right to control one’s own body—they attack it as being dangerous to women and children.

But let’s be crystal clear: their defense of families only goes so far. The right has celebrated ICE kidnapping kids and separating breastfeeding babies from their mamas. The party of “family values” has decried Americans resisting ICE as “organized gangs of wine moms.” Excusing Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophilia, Megyn Kelly—herself a mom—described Epstein’s 15-year-old victims as “the barely legal type.” They were children, full stop.

This month, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed the SAVE Act, a voter suppression bill that would prevent up to 69 million American women from voting simply because we changed our last names after getting married.

This level of hypocrisy from the right is mind-boggling, yet it goes pretty much unchallenged.

Last year, Samantha Mann wrote a piece in TIME titled “Reclaiming Motherhood” that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. In it, she says, “[As] the conservative right makes motherhood its ideological stronghold, the left risks ceding not just the narrative, but the cultural and political power that comes with it. What would it mean to embrace motherhood not only as a struggle but a site of potential joy and creativity?”

Samantha is right, and we are currently living the consequences.

The left treats motherhood as a policy problem. Indeed, the United States has the highest maternal and infant mortality rates in the industrialized world. We lose $120 billion a year because of the lack of childcare. If we had similar labor force participation rates to countries like Canada and Germany, which have family-friendly policies, we would add more than 5 million women to the workforce and more than $500 billion a year to the economy.

But by addressing these issues solely through the lens of policy, too many on the left can lose sight of the personal.

I think of the infamous Hillary Clinton quote from her husband’s 1992 presidential campaign: “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life.” (To be clear, Hillary is a trailblazer who paved the way for women in politics, and there’s no question that she would be a million times better than the fascist we have in the White House now.)

But let me share an alternate vision: I love baking cookies and reading stories with my babies just as much as I love being Founder and CEO of Vote Mama, an organization building the political power of moms.

I love being a mama. It changed my whole identity, and it gave me a purpose and reason to fight even harder.

I was the mom who quit a job I loved when I had no paid family leave, because I couldn’t imagine leaving my daughter with strangers at just a few weeks old. I am the cosleeping, extended breastfeeding, baby-wearing type of mama—the kind some would label “crunchy.”

I’ve been the stay-at-home mom, the work-from-home mom, and the run for Congress while nursing two babies mom. I’ve loved every minute of it, even when I was exhausted and pissed as hell that our policies absolutely fail women and children in our country.

The left doesn’t need to gloss over the challenges of parenting and weaken our advocacy around pro-family policies, such as paid leave, universal childcare, and universal healthcare (also known as the basic economic building blocks of a society). Nor do we need to adopt the right’s tradwife narrative that a woman’s greatest purpose in life is birthing and raising children.

Instead, we should be reframing the conversation to make clear that the highs and lows of parenting, real as they are, exist in the context of a political system that makes caregiving an individual responsibility, rather than treating it as the foundation we need for a strong economy.

Parenting is hard—and it’s joyful, messy, meaningful, and deeply political. Feeding your baby while rationing formula, navigating preschool costs, and hoping your school is safe? That’s politics.

The breastfeeding mom I mentioned before, who was separated from her two-and-a-half month old by ICE? She was abducted on her way to work, because without paid leave, she didn’t have enough money for diapers. That’s public policy.

If you’re negotiating daycare, advocating for gun safety, or caring for a sick parent, you’re already engaged in the political system.

As the right weaponizes motherhood to excuse human rights abuses, shield child predators, and push women out of public life, the left’s response must be rooted in our own vision of motherhood. One in which our politics don’t exist independent of our motherhood, but because of it. And yes, one in which there is just as much happiness and pride in parenting as there is hardship and policy failure.

I saw a post that said, “Do you remember that feeling you had when the second plane hit? You should have that feeling now.”

This hit me in a way that made me physically ill. I remember the exact moment the second plane hit. I was a junior at NYU, living in a dorm just blocks from the towers, and we were evacuated from our building shortly after it happened. It was the moment we knew it was a terrorist attack—the moment we knew America would never be the same.

A quarter of a century later, I have that feeling again. This weekend, our federal government murdered Alex Pretti. He was a 37-year-old ICU nurse who took care of veterans. The U.S. government murdered him while he was protecting a woman they had knocked down, and then arrested the witnesses. Even worse, as Alex’s parents mourn the heartbreaking loss of their son, they have had to push back against lies told by our own government. “Please get the truth out about our son,” they said in a statement. “He was a good man.”

ICE has shot nine people since September and killed three U.S. citizens—Alex Pretti, Renee Good, and Keith Porter. Dozens more people have died in ICE custody since Donald Trump was sworn into his second term.

I was crying in my kitchen this weekend, but trying to pretend I was fine so I could function as a mom and go play in the snow with my kids. As I helped my babies get their jackets and boots on, I couldn’t stop thinking about the kids and parents who’ve become victims of ICE’s unprecedented assault on our communities.

My youngest is five. He rolled over in bed this morning, put his arm around my neck, and said, “Mama, I love you.” He has a Spiderman backpack, just like the one Liam Ramos was wearing when ICE kidnapped him. ICE used Liam as bait to lure family members out of his home, and took him and his father into custody.

Two weeks ago, ICE grabbed a 10-year-old fourth grader on her way to school with her mother, and they are still in ICE detention. I too have a fourth grader. He loves soccer, learning about black holes and square waves, and playing magna-tiles with his little brother. These are children. They’re not criminals.

My friend just texted me that she couldn’t sleep last night thinking about her kids being away from her like that. We are all feeling this—at least those of us with empathy, morals, and a belief in the rule of law.

We all have eyes. We all saw the horrifying video of ICE agent Jonathan Ross executing Renee Good in broad daylight and then calling her a “fucking bitch.” She was a mom of three kids, ages 15, 12, and 6.

Another friend of mine texted me today to tell me she’s applying for a new job, adding that she’s “been feeling the need to do meaningful work.” I responded, “Meaningful work is the only thing getting me through this shit.” I founded Vote Mama to grow the political power of Democratic moms—but not just any moms—strong candidates who will use their power for good, who will use their power to make life better for all families.

Moms like New Jersey Congresswoman LaMonica McIver. She has a nine-year-old daughter and is facing 17 years in prison for doing her job, conducting congressional oversight of ICE, and demanding accountability from Trump. This administration doesn’t want oversight, because oversight works. They want to weaponize the Justice Department to attack anyone who dares stand up to them.

Moms like Vermont Congresswoman Becca Balint. She traveled to Minneapolis to speak with people on the ground about what ICE is doing to them. “They are detaining anyone that they can get their hands on, who is speaking in an accent, who has a darker shade of skin, and they’re not even trying to hide it.” Minnesotans asked Becca to warn the rest of us: “This state of terror is coming to you. It’s not just going to be Minnesota. This is the way they are trying to break our spirit.” Becca has since been providing information about how to train peaceful constitutional observers.

Moms like Congressmembers Becca Balint, Maxine Dexter, Laura Friedman, Adelita Grijalva, Julie Johnson, Sydney Kamlager-Dove, LaMonica McIver, Brittany Pettersen, Lateefah Simon, Jill Tokuda, and Nikema Williams, who have all signed on as co-sponsors to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

Moms like AZ Attorney General Kris Mayes, who warned ICE: “We are watching you. If you violate an Arizona law, I will prosecute you. We will investigate you, and we will make sure that Arizona laws are enforced. That includes assault, murder, unlawful imprisonment, and other state crimes.”

Our president and his entire administration is a danger to our country—and moms are fighting back. Our Democratic mamas are leading the way in demanding accountability, and even my friends who don’t work in politics have been messaging me and asking me what they can do.

Meaningful work is the only thing getting me through this shit. Our team at Vote Mama is thinking about organizing a national call to connect Congressmembers who are doing good work in this moment with everyday Americans who are sickened by what is happening. As scary as this time is, the only way we’re going to get through it is by all of us coming together and using our collective power. The people are the ultimate check on the federal government.

Would you be interested in joining a national call? What questions do you have for our Democratic mamas? Are you ready to take action? Comment below with your thoughts, and let’s do some meaningful work.

Every political organization wants to win elections—Vote Mama PAC included—but that’s not why we do what we do.

We work to grow the political power of Democratic moms, because we know that our mamas will use that power to make life better for families.

Policy is the goal; politics is the path to get there.

In 2025, Vote Mama PAC made our largest-ever investment into Virginia races—and it paid off. We helped elect Abigail Spanberger as Virginia’s first woman and first mama governor. Our endorsed moms flipped 9 of the 13 seats that went from red to blue in the House of Delegates. Overall, we had a win rate of 96% in Virginia.

They were just sworn in last week, and our mamas are already making a difference.

Right after becoming governor, Abigail’s first executive order was to stop requiring state and local police to help enforce federal immigration law. As ICE continues to sow division, terrorize communities, and escalate tension to the point that agents are murdering U.S. citizens in broad daylight, Governor Spanberger’s order makes clear that law enforcement should be focused on actually keeping people safe, not doing the bidding of a lawless president.

Meanwhile, the Virginia General Assembly has advanced four ballot initiatives to safeguard our democracy and protect Virginians’ fundamental freedoms. Voters will now have the opportunity to vote on:

• Countering Republican attempts to rig the midterm elections through gerrymandering;

• Restoring voting rights for formerly incarcerated Virginians;

• Codifying the right to abortion—in the last state in the South to have abortion rights; and

• Repealing a ban on same-sex marriage, which could be enforced if the conservative majority on the Supreme Court overturns the previous marriage equality ruling.

When mamas win at the ballot box, our families win with better policies.

And there’s more good news on the horizon for moms serving at the highest levels of leadership.

Vote Mama alum former Delegate Candi Mundon King was appointed by Governor Spanberger to serve as Secretary of the Commonwealth. When she was in the House of Delegates, Candi was instrumental in passing the “Momnibus” bill to improve maternal health care in Virginia. In her new position, Candi will help with appointments to state boards and commissions, and she’ll have the power to make state government more representative and more responsive to the needs of everyday people.

Our mama Delegate Destiny LeVere Bolling now serves as Majority Whip, which is the #3 leadership position in the House of Delegates. Destiny has an 11-month-old daughter, and she’ll bring her valuable lived experience as a mama who gave birth in office and has nursed her baby on the House floor.

Finally, Delegate Elizabeth Bennett-Parker, who we’ve long supported in her campaigns for the House of Delegates, has won a special primary election for the VA Senate. In my last Substack, I mentioned that Elizabeth has been fighting for more changing tables in public spaces, which any mama who’s experienced a blowout knows is deeply necessary. Elizabeth’s general election is in February, and her race is critical to defending a one-seat Democratic majority in the chamber.

Both of us have run for office before—Liuba for Congress and Kristy for Michigan State House. Knowing that there are a lot of political organizations out there that just issue endorsements and cut checks, we built Vote Mama PAC to do things differently.

Yes, we endorse candidates and raise money for them, and yes, we’re damn proud of our track record electing Democratic moms. But we also work to build a Mamas Network of moms helping each other out and lifting each other up, because any mama knows that it really does take a village. We stick with our endorsed moms even after their elections are over, because the whole point of winning elections and gaining power is to use that power to do good.

And no one fights harder for families than a Democratic mama.

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I was on the train yesterday, blaring the Spirits by the Strumbellas and staring out the window, when I felt my eyes well up—not from grief, but rather something else. A brief glimmer of hope; a brief glimmer of younger me bopping around, listening to good music, and imagining how I would change the world.

It was such an odd feeling this week that I decided to write it down, both to process how I was feeling and to remember this moment. And now, to share it with you.

The start of 2026 has felt dark and overwhelming. One of my mom friends is a lawyer who works with children on Special Immigrant Juvenile Status. Yesterday she told our group chat that ICE has been camping out in the parking lot and grabbing kids as they walk into the courthouse. Meanwhile, in another text chain, we discussed Trump referring to himself as Venezuela’s “acting president.” But of course, all of this is happening while I’m at work—discussing our response to the murder of Renee Nicole Good, a mama of three, at the hands of an ICE goon who shot her in the face three times and then called her a “fucking bitch.” In partnership with other like-minded organizations, we organized a virtual call that brought more than 6,000 people together. None of us are okay.

Moms are carrying so much right now. We have to listen to the White House tell blatant lies from official channels and then do story time.

We watch ICE go door-to-door and hunt people down. Bed time.

Families being torn apart. School drop-offs. The Vice President saying that ICE can murder with “absolute immunity.” Cook dinner.

And somewhere in all of that mess we also have to make sure our children understand what’s happening in an age-appropriate way. But how do you explain the incomprehensible to a child?

The night Renee was murdered, my nine-year-old kept asking me about Renee’s six-year-old. “Does he know that his mama isn’t coming home?” This question broke me.

Every day there is a new horror, and every day I feel sick. None of this about politics. It’s about basic humanity, belief in our Constitution, belief that there is a right and a wrong, and belief in reality.

So what about this glimmer of hope I mentioned? It’s flickering, it’s fleeting, but it’s there. And I’m talking about it, because without hope we can’t keep fighting. Without hope this administration wins.

I’m publishing this from Albany, where I am in town for the State of the State. My friend, my mentor, and the first mama Governor of New York Kathy Hochul is talking today about our state’s unprecedented investment in expanding childcare to cover two-year-olds in New York City, a key step in making childcare universal. This is what happens when you elect a Democratic mama. I remember the Governor telling me how she had to quit her dream job when she first became a mom. I too quit a job I loved when I became a mother, because I couldn’t get off any childcare wait lists. Legislators legislate on their lived experience, and moms get shit done.

Speaking of “shit,” this week, my friend and VA Delegate, Elizabeth Bennett-Parker, met with stakeholders and explained the reality of every parent’s nightmare—not having access to a changing table after their baby’s had a blowout in a public space. She brought her perspective as a mom, read stories from constituents, and convinced everyone at the meeting to increase access to changing tables in new developments. And not only did her proposal advance, she’s also on the ballot today for a special election to the VA Senate.

There it is again. Hope—creeping in.

My friend and WA Representative, Liz Berry, just introduced legislation that would allow candidates and elected officials to use Campaign Funds for Security—a policy Vote Mama Lobby advocates for at the state level—and to redact their home address from public-facing documents. This is a critical campaign finance reform to protect public servants and their families and make it safer for moms to run and serve. I was just talking to our Policy Director Louisa Duggan, who is going to Olympia tomorrow to testify in support of Rep. Berry’s bill. Hope.

Following Vote Mama PAC’s Ultimate Moms Night Out event last fall and our 90% win rate in the 2025 November elections, we have seen a groundswell of excitement from our growing community to step up and take action to support our endorsed candidates. More than 50 people have already expressed interest in hosting a Moms Night Out, a fun and easy night with their friends to raise dollars into our Mama Fund, which goes directly to our moms’ campaigns. We are creating a pipeline from everyday people to our candidates, organizing political dollars and actions that directly support the campaigns of regular moms stepping up to represent their communities. Our inaugural Moms Night Out Week is coming up February 7-13, and I just scheduled my own Moms Night Out!

Hope is something I desperately need right now, so I’m going to blare my music, watch the sunset over the icy Hudson, think about good people doing good things, and hold on to that tiny glimmer.

Democrats swept races across the country last month, flipping seats, winning majorities, and securing critical gubernatorial victories in New Jersey and Virginia. If you read the post-election analyses, you might think that Democrats won solely because voters are angry with Trump. They are, but that’s hardly the whole story.

The truth is that voters want candidates who show up with authenticity. They need to trust that their elected representatives understand and unabashedly fight for everyday people, and will actually address the affordability crisis. That is what so many winning candidates delivered.

At Vote Mama and Run for Something, we are reinventing the formula of who runs for office. We are reshaping the Democratic Party and inviting voters back into our tent by showing them a new vision of what leadership can be.

One of us, Liuba Grechen Shirley, created Vote Mama after running for Congress while caring for two toddlers. I can still remember dialing for dollars while holding my one-year-old son, nursing, and having my three-year-old daughter put an obscene number of clips in my hair. I saw firsthand how the system wasn’t built for moms. I didn’t win that race, but I devoted myself to making it easier for moms of little ones to run, get elected, and serve. Since 2019, Vote Mama PAC has supported more than 600 Democratic moms nationwide, from school board to U.S. Senate. And through our structural work—pushing to allow campaign funds to cover childcare and security expenses—we’re tearing down a system that was never built for working families.

The other one of us, Amanda Litman, co-founded Run for Something in 2017 at the age of 27, knowing that the path to change is changing our leaders. We’ve built a movement and helped elect over 1,600 millennial and Gen Z candidates to local and state legislative offices nationwide. Having my daughters over the last three years has only reinforced my drive to build a better future by empowering a new generation of leaders who will fight for the futures all our kids deserve.

As moms, we do this work because we want to give our kids a world they can be proud of. They’re our north stars, and delivering for them means refusing to accept inaction—from ourselves or our elected officials—as extremists threaten our economic wellbeing and our fundamental freedoms. For decades, Republicans have shown us exactly who they are: Slashing childcare, blocking paid family and medical leave, and turning their backs on working families. They pretend to care about “family values” but do nothing as families are hungry, losing jobs, and going without basic benefits. It’s cruelty dressed up as politics.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We just need leaders in power who have the guts to do something about it: People who know what it’s like to work two jobs just to pay rent, to face the impossibility of buying a home, to get laid off from their job, and to raise children when basic affordability is out of reach.

In 2025, candidates supported by Vote Mama and Run for Something proved that fresh, authentic campaigns, built from the ground up, can win with a message centered on affordability and the struggles of everyday families. In Virginia, Stacey Carroll, a foster parent and veteran, helped deliver the largest Democratic majority the General Assembly has had in decades. In Minnesota, Amanda Hemmingsen-Jaeger restored the balance of power for Democrats in the state Senate, while in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Danielle Chesek is bringing decency to the school board.

Nine out of the 13 seats Democrats flipped in Virginia were candidates endorsed by Vote Mama, and Run for Something helped lead a wave of victories in districts long dominated by Republicans, including rural communities and regions party insiders have all but given up on. Our work, combined, has flipped legislatures and city councils, shattered glass ceilings, and sent Moms for Liberty candidates packing—proving that real progress doesn’t come from the establishment, but rather from the ground up.

This is what it will take for Democrats to build lasting power. We don’t need to ask the question “What do voters want?” because the answer is right there in front of us. We’re living in a consequential moment where voters are craving a new generation of Democratic leadership.

The work we’ve invested in has paid off, and it’s clear in the candidates who are rising—and winning.

Let’s continue the work together. Support inspiring candidates in your community, run for office, or encourage someone you know—whether it’s an everyday mom, a Gen Z renter, or a millennial fighting to make ends meet. Authentic, values-driven leaders will drive wins up and down the ballot in 2026, and they can transform our country with it.