Why it might get a lot easier for parents to run for office in New Jersey – NorthJersey.com

Christine Clarke says she is running for New Jersey Assembly for her four children.

As an environmental activist, the 41-year-old said “there are facts you can’t unlearn” — like that there is a 12-year deadline to rein in global warming before catastrophe hits, according to the United Nations. 

But balancing parenting and campaigning — especially as a Democratic challenger in the solidly red 26th Legislative District in North Jersey — requires her to get creative with scheduling. 

“Some parents are fantastic at multitasking, but when it comes to the candidate space, you need to focus on the constituents you’re calling, and that’s difficult to do as a mom,” Clarke said. 

New Jersey lawmakers are trying to make it easier and are considering a bill to allow parents running for or already in political office to use campaign checks to pay for certain child care expenses. 

New Jersey follows a handful of states across the country, including New York, New Hampshire, Colorado and Utah, that could help lessen the burden of mothers and fathers juggling campaigning with raising children.

But the Garden State is going a step further than those other states, and wants to expand this campaign finance rule to apply also to elected officeholders, something that is explicitly allowed only in Utah and Minnesota. 

Parents could use money they raised on the campaign trail to pay for child care costs that exist because of their political race or job. So, fair game: a babysitter watching a child during a campaign event, or new day care services if the candidate previously didn’t need them because he or she worked from home. 

“Child care is enormously expensive, so many people wait to run for office when their children are older because it’s cheaper and easier to manage,” said Jean Sinzdak, associate director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers, which studies women’s participation in politics. “These bills are so helpful to leveling the playing field as to who has the time and resources to run for office.”

And across the country, states have seen a “pink wave” since President Donald Trump’s election. In the 2018 legislative races, a record 3,418 women won major party nominations across the 46 states that held elections, which do not include New Jersey. That’s almost a 30 percent jump from the previous record in 2016, according to the Rutgers Center for American Women and Politics. And an unprecedented 59 female candidates will compete in New Jersey Assembly races, up from 53 in 2017.

Currently, a search for expenses labeled “child care,” “babysitter” and “caretaker” doesn’t return any results in the state database of campaign data, though the website hasn’t been updated to include expenses for 2018. And no candidate has asked the state election commission for permission to spend on child care, election agency officials said. 

Assemblywoman Nancy Munoz, R-Union, who is a sponsor of the bill, said she has seen pushback on Facebook from people who don’t understand that child care would be paid for with money that candidates raise themselves. 

“It’s not taxpayers’ dollars. It’s ridiculous when I see people saying that ‘why don’t we pay for their college tuition, too?’ ” Munoz said. “If you’re going door to door for four hours to try and raise money, then you should be able to use that money on a babysitter for those four hours.”

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Some candidates are reluctant even to consider expensing such costs because they don’t want to come off as self-serving. Clarke takes issue with that, citing the financial hurdles a person in the working class has when running for office. 

“The job application is months long, requires extensive travel, taking meals away from home, child care, clothing expenses, maintenance on your car and other things that come up, and it’s very difficult to forgo a salary while taking on all those expenses,” Clarke said. “So we should be able to have these hard conversations about whether it makes sense to expand the allowable campaign expenses, to allow more people at the table.”

Munoz said she has gotten comments that she introduced the legislation to benefit herself. 

“They accuse the women behind this of being self-serving, that we’re doing this to help ourselves,” Munoz said. “My youngest is 26. I’m not using this. We’re doing this to open the field to others. We were fortunate that we were able to have child care without needing this.”

Why are states looking at child care?

A wave of states began introducing similar bills after a federal congressional candidate in New York and mother of two needed a babysitter. 

Democrat Liuba Grechen Shirley, 38, was challenging Republican Rep. Peter King in New York’s 2nd District in 2018. Grechen Shirley, a former nonprofit consultant, worked from home and took care of her two children, then-3-year-old daughter Mila and 1-year-old son Nicholas. She made fundraising calls as she nursed her son and let her daughter play with her hair. 

But after Nicholas tripped on a toy and broke his leg, hospital bills began to pile up, and Grechen Shirley wasn’t sure how she would make it financially. So she asked for help from the Federal Election Commission, the agency that oversees elections. 

Although Grechen Shirley lost her 2018 race, she won an opinion in May of that year that allowed her to use campaign money to pay a part-time babysitter, opening the door for other candidates to hire help for their kids from this new financial source. Federal lawmakers also introduced two bills this session that would codify this rule, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. 

In the 2018 federal elections, 18 candidates spent a combined $32,000 on child care services, according to data from the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. Grechen Shirley reported $3,632 on babysitting costs.  

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Grechen Shirley has since founded a group called VoteMama that helps elect Democratic mothers to federal, state and local offices. 

“Taking time off from work to run for office is expensive, and if we want more working parents in office who will fight for affordable child care, paid family leave and other family-friendly policies, we need to allow candidates to use their campaign funds on child care,” Grechen Shirley said. 

Grechen Shirley’s request spurred states to introduce their own legislation that made it explicit child care costs can be paid by campaigns. The states that considered legislation in 2019 include California, Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Utah, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures and a NorthJersey.com analysis of Legiscan data. 

Most bills are still pending.

“This really shows why representation matters,” said Sinzdak, of Rutgers. “A woman faced this situation and asked, ‘What are my rights? Can I have access to these resources?’ It shows how the conversation changes when you have different people running for office.” 

Final steps in New Jersey

Clarke says her children are the “finest activists I’ve ever met.” Her 5-year-old daughter, Sarah, is a huge fan of U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill, D-Morris, and when Clarke filled out her candidate form, Sarah took a Sharpie marker and filled out one of her own.

Clarke home-schools her children, so she can’t plan any campaign activities during their time in the classroom. She and her husband, Chris, barely see each other, she said, and he now works an extra day a week at home as an automation engineer so someone can watch the kids. Her oldest son, John, is 14, so he can “pinch hit” as needed, Clarke said, but she has to make sure someone is always taking care of Sarah, 12-year-old Kaden and 3-year-old James, who recently stopped nursing. 

Clarke is the chairwoman of the Jefferson Township Democratic Committee and a former environmental director of the liberal nonprofit Action Together New Jersey and organizer with NJ 11th For Change. 

Although she would bring her children along to her activism events, many of her campaign stops aren’t really suitable for them. 

“They can’t be running around strategy sessions where we’re talking about the race, or stuck in a hearing room in Trenton,” she said. 

Clarke is challenging two Republican incumbents, realtor BettyLou DeCroce and lawyer Jay Webber, in a district covering parts of Essex, Morris and Passaic counties where Republicans have filled all three of the district’s Senate and Assembly seats since 1982. 

As of June 21, Clarke had raised close to $40,000, with about 40 percent coming from small-dollar donors giving under $300. Her largest check, of $8,200, came from Brendan Gill, Gov. Phil Murphy’s former campaign manager who is now a senior adviser for a nonprofit supporting Murphy. She has so far spent $12,000 on her website, printing, staff, office supplies and events.  

That’s a far cry from the $189,000 DeCroce raised or the $144,000 that Webber collected through mid-June, according to state campaign finance filings. 

DeCroce is one of the co-sponsors of the child care funds bill and a prime sponsor on another piece of legislation that would make day care facilities available to state employees. 

“I was a councilwoman in my mid-20s with two young boys, and I remember how hard it was for me to also be a mom,” DeCroce said. “It wasn’t always easy trying to find and afford somebody to watch my children, and there were desperate moments.”

The New Jersey Senate passed the child care bill 33-0 in late June. The Assembly will hold a session in July at which the bill could be voted on for a final time and sent to Murphy. 

“I would happily champion this legislation,” Clarke said. “Our recent politics have illustrated the need for diverse voices. The people who are close to the pain should be close to the power.”

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