Inside one state's fight to save child care
is a policy correspondent for Vox covering social policy. She focuses on housing, schools, homelessness, child care, and abortion rights, and has been reporting on these issues for more than a decade.
Welcome to Field Notes, a reporter's log that gives readers an inside look into some of our most exciting reporting trips. This first appeared in the member-exclusive newsletter the Vox Explainer.
Hi, hello!
This is Rachel Cohen, a reporter at Vox, and I'm here to share a dispatch from a recent reporting trip to Boise, Idaho — where a unique and heated political fight unfolded in the world of child care policy. The piece not only looks at a growing partisan divide in child care but also a broader conservative push to deregulate the sector and redirect public funds away from the license-based centers government subsidies have historically favored.
For both time and budget reasons, I don't get to travel for most stories I work on. In this case though, thanks to a grant from the Bainum Family Foundation to support child care reporting, I was quite fortunate to spend four days meeting with lawmakers, parents, and child care advocates in Idaho. There I worked to understand a very complex, sensitive, and confusing story. In journalism, what I've realized over the years is that oftentimes the very act of traveling to a region can signal to otherwise hesitant sources that you are taking this story seriously. It shows you are investing resources into getting it right, which increases the chances that people will help you and talk with you. They see you're making a greater effort than just picking up the phone, and that really does mean something in this line of work.
Sometimes reporting trips are to collect more vivid detail and description to bring a narrative to life. I wanted to do that, certainly, but this trip was primarily for me to better understand what was really going on, to sit down with people face-to-face, and clarify a series of fast-moving and complicated ideas. I did make a lot of calls. I did review all the existing local reporting before I flew out. And I filed my own public records request with the state of Idaho. But I suspected that going there would prove valuable in being able to report this story better than just doing those things in isolation. Given all the flight delays and other travel complications, I'm very glad that turned out to be true.
You can find the story here. Here's a look inside my reporting.
Field Notes
SUNDAY, MARCH 9
10:30 am: I flew from Washington, DC, where I live, to Atlanta, and then on to Boise. After dealing with some delays with my flight layover, I finally reached my hotel a little after midnight. The long day of travel gave me a lot of time to review my notes and get ready for what I knew would be a busy week.
At the Boise Airport, I was greeted by a nice reminder that I was surrounded by some famous potatoes.
A sign that greeted me at the Boise Airport when I arrived. Rachel Cohen/Vox
MONDAY, MARCH 10
12 pm: My first meeting was at the (very beautiful) Idaho State Capitol, a short walk from my hotel. I learned I was in what is known as the 'Gem State,' a nickname first coined when Idaho was just a US territory in honor of all the precious gemstones around.
I sat down with Democratic state Rep. Megan Egbert to learn more about the H243 bill and what she was hearing from her constituents. She was actively involved in the legislative opposition.
The main entrance really was beautiful, and to my surprise — maybe just because I'm used to stricter protocol — there was no security. Anyone could walk right in. Rachel Cohen/Vox
2 pm: Later that afternoon, I went over to the Idaho Association of Commerce & Industry, which is basically their state chamber of commerce, and met with the longtime president to discuss how the lack of child care access affects the state's workforce and economy.
I turned left. We sat in a big conference room for our meeting. Rachel Cohen/Vox
7 pm: At night, I had some calls with child care providers. Idaho is two hours behind DC, and being able to talk to people in their own time zone made reporting a whole lot easier. Oftentimes people can only talk with the media after work, so coordinating evening discussions was just a whole lot easier on Mountain time.
TUESDAY, MARCH 11
10:30 am: I spent the morning meeting with sources off the record (so I can't share specifically who), but I can say I had some very clarifying coffee dates. Then I made my way over to Lakewood Montessori, a reputable child care center in Boise where I got to tour and sit down with the owner, Mary, to talk about the proposed bill. It was a beautiful day, and I knew I wanted to speak with as many child care providers as I could while I was in town.
From my tour of the Boise Montessori child care center. It was a really lovely facility, and seeing such cute kids always makes the drier parts of the reporting process worth it. Rachel Cohen/Vox
2 pm: After lunch, I headed back to the state Capitol where I met separately with both of the bill's co-sponsors, Rep. Rod Furniss and Rep. Barbara Ehardt. I learned that the bill was going to be amended the next day to restore maximum staff-child ratios, and I spoke with the lawmakers about why they believed deregulation was a good idea in the first place.
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 12
10 am: Today I had several more off-the-record meetings with sources and calls with child care providers around the state.
5:30 pm: I had the pleasure of having dinner with my old editor, Haley, who I interned for 12 years ago at the Washington Monthly. She now lives in Boise with her husband and two kids.
In Haley's kitchen! Rachel Cohen/Vox
THURSDAY, MARCH 13
8 am: My last day in town proved valuable. After persistent badgering, several sources finally agreed to talk, including from Wonder School — a company facing public backlash for supporting the bill — and officials from the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare. I also connected with people I'd talk with further when I returned to DC as more legislative developments unfolded throughout March.
11 pm: I got home and spent another three-and-a-half weeks reporting and writing the article!
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is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy,, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here. When President Donald Trump and Elon Musk had their dramatic falling-out last week, it appeared the right was on the brink of civil war — with Musk's allies in the 'tech right' poised to battle Steve Bannon and his faction of populist tribunes. The battle lines reflected deep disagreements between the right's factions about the nature and purpose of government, divides made increasingly salient by Trump's policies in areas like trade. But now, after several days of protests and unrest in Los Angeles, everyone is once again reading from the same hymnal — condemning disorder and calling for a harsh crackdown. Even Musk is back to retweeting Trump like nothing happened. Why this intra-right ceasefire? Because what's happening in LA reminds every component of the modern right why they're in coalition together: They believe that progressives in general, and the 'woke' left activists in particular, represent an existential threat to everything good about the United States. This vision has deep philosophical roots on the right, which has always positioned itself around defending elements of the status quo from its enemies on the left. But the 2025 American right tells itself a very particular version of that general story, one that focuses on the events of summer 2020. On the Right The ideas and trends driving the conservative movement, from senior correspondent Zack Beauchamp. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. In their minds, the combination of Covid restrictions, mainstream calls for wide-ranging social change, and mass street upheaval was the terrible terminus of modern progressive politics. Whatever their internal disagreements on issues like trade or spending or even immigration, the modern right agrees that the left must never be permitted another year like 2020 — and that Trump is the best vehicle for stopping it. The Trump coalition has appeared fractious for much of 2025 because the big policy moves, like tariffs, have made areas of disagreement in the coalition more salient. It appears united for now because the news cycle has shifted to a topic — the specter of radical left street disorder — on which nearly everyone inside of it agrees. The right's long 2020 Philosophically speaking, the right has long been defined by its emphasis on the value of stability — as odd as it may seem in the era of Trump's radically destabilizing administration. Conservative theorists, most notably Edmund Burke, have long maintained that political flourishing depends on the existence of stable social rules developed gradually and from the bottom up over the course of generations. Those who seek to overturn this order, either through sweeping legislation or revolutionary violence, will inevitably do more harm than good. For this reason, the right's intellectuals have long positioned themselves against what they saw as instances of leftist street violence. Yet Trump has spent the past 10 years setting the American political order on fire — demolishing its norms, enacting radical changes to its longstanding policies, and flagrantly violating its laws. He even incited an honest-to-God insurrection aimed at overturning an election. How could any of this fit with a tradition premised on the values of stability and order? The answer, in part, is that it doesn't. The intellectual right has adopted a self-consciously revolutionary mode of politics, seeing the current political order as a fundamentally corrupt system that deserves to be torn down. This is a reactionary rejection of Burkean conservatism, which is why so many erstwhile Burkeans became the Never Trumpers who publish at places like the Dispatch and the Bulwark. And yet, there's a crucial element of the Burkean emphasis on order that the Trump right has retained: a belief that some specific elements of American life remain uncorrupted, and that the 'woke left' must be defeated for those elements to again become the country's defining traits. Traditional religion, conservative cultural values, a market economy, the notion of national pride, and even nationhood itself — these are the elements of the United States that the modern right sees as being under attack from the left and the institutions (like universities) where it is in control. This sense of siege, of a need for counterrevolution, crystalized in the summer of 2020. It wasn't only that there was rioting in America's cities, or that major American cultural institutions were aligning themselves with once-radical views on race and gender. It's that both were happening at the same time, suggesting that radicals in the streets were seizing the commanding heights of American public life. 'The individual acts of violence — the sacking of urban police stations, the Molotov cocktails thrown at police cruisers, the toppling of historical statues, the wholesale looting of big-box stores — were, in fact, the representations of a long-running cultural revolution,' leading right-wing activist Chris Rufo wrote in his 2023 book America's Cultural Revolution. 'In city after city, [Black Lives Matter] activists, including its paramilitaries in the black nationalist and anarcho-socialist factions, shut down urban neighborhoods, intimidated residents, and established their ideology as a social requisite.' This is, to my mind, a wildly exaggerated narrative of that summer's events (a consistent problem in Rufo's work). It vastly overstates the pervasiveness of the violence and paints with an ideologically overbroad brush, ignoring that most people were in the streets because they were deeply and sincerely concerned about racism in policing. Yet there's some truth as well. The summer's events, including riots in Minneapolis and Seattle's disastrous 'autonomous zone', did real harm to real people — in ways that many mainstream liberals and leftists were unwilling to admit at the time. That liberal elites endorsed street protest amid the Covid pandemic, when the public health establishment was recommending people stay away from mass gatherings, fueled the right's outrage. It was, to them, a sign that the so-called establishment was not only flawed but fully corrupt; so shot through with political bias that it would tell people to go protest for George Floyd, but stop attending church. From this was born the mythic underpinnings of the modern Trump right: a deep fear of chaotic, violent left-wing radicals, paired with a sense that mainstream liberals and nonpartisan experts are in thrall to said extremists. This is the narrative that knits together the various factions of MAGA 2.0: the tech right, the national populists, the atheist anti-wokes, the Christian nationalists, and on down the line. There are reasonable grounds to doubt that everyone believes it sincerely, but it defines much of the conceptual vocabulary right-wingers use to communicate across factional lines. We may not agree on everything, they say, but we are all against that. What's happening in LA right now brings this set of uniting concerns to the fore. Once again, progressives and radicals have taken to the streets to demonstrate against what they see as social injustices. Once again, there are clear instances of looting and violence (though I'd add that these are once again being widely exaggerated). And once again, it appears to many on the right as if the liberal establishment were siding with the people in the streets — with LA Mayor Karen Bass and California Gov. Gavin Newsom (correctly) downplaying the scale of the violence and rejecting Trump's efforts to send in the troops, in large part because they believe it to be at once unnecessary and counterproductive. It is thus no surprise that in the face of recent events, the right's infighting would give way to a display of unity. When the right sees the specter of 2020 looming over America, its cadres feel an urgent need to form ranks.
