In recent years, child care has achieved stark recognition as an essential service—when COVID-era school closures upended working parents’ lives, they got mad, and at least some of them got organized. To Rebecca Bailin, a co-founder and the executive director of New Yorkers United for Child Care, the announcement was proof of concept: “If we can organize parents, and people thinking about becoming parents, then we can truly change New York’s politics.” Her advocacy group, which was founded in 2023, has campaigned on the city and state level for a path to universal care. Bailin has the tininess and sparkplug execution of an Olympic gymnast; at the Y, she stood onstage directly behind Mamdani, her “New Yorkers United for Child Care” cap bobbing into view just above his shoulder. Nearby was Jennifer Gutiérrez, a city councillor who has been pushing for universal child care since she took office, in 2022. Later, she told me that, at the Y that day, she was getting ecstatic texts from friends (“Oh, my god, you did it!”). She remembered replying, “ ‘Well, it’s not that simple . . .’ ”