By the time Rebecca Bailin reached her mid-30s, she had grown tired of watching friend after friend get priced out of New York City once they started having children.

Ms. Bailin, a community organizer, feared a fresh wave of departures to Maplewood, N.J., or the Midwest after Mayor Eric Adams started cutting funding for prekindergarten. She began organizing parents in her Brooklyn neighborhood to help fight the cuts.

In the three years since, her group, New Yorkers United for Childcare, has organized more than 6,000 people to push for universal child care programs. They are part of a coalition of parent advocates, think tanks and philanthropies aiming to put the high cost of child care at the forefront of the local political agenda.

In so doing, they are fueling the creation of a new species in New York City politics: the child care voter.

“This is when we are all considering where we are going to live for decades to come,” she said of herself and her friends. And child care, she said, “is an investment to help us stay.”

Ms. Bailin now has an even better reason to focus on the issue. Her first child is due this summer.

The politicians vying to be the city’s next mayor appear to be paying attention to New York’s fed-up parents.