January 30, 2024 • 44 mins
Latinos represent the US electorate’s second fastest-growing voting group, with about 36.2 million Latinos expected to vote in the 2024 presidential election. Latino voters have tended to have low turnout rates in elections, but this hefty increase in that electoral pool is due to the mobilization of enthusiastic and engaged younger and US-born Latino voters. Latino voters have strong regional differences in their cultures and values and this plays out around what they care about: Entrepreneurial opportunities, abortion, voting rights, citizenship, and immigration, among other issues. Latino voters played a pivotal role in Joe Biden’s 2020 victory and they will figure prominently in a 2024 presidential race in which Donald Trump can leverage strides he’s made courting them. Maria Teresa Kumar is the CEO of Voto Latino, an influential advocacy group that mobilizes Latino voters around a range of issues.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Crash Course, a podcast about business, political, and
social disruption and what we can learn from it. I'm
Tim O'Brien. Today's Crash Course Latinos versus the twenty twenty
four election. Consider the numbers. Latinos represent the US electorate's
second fastest growing voting group after Asian Americans. About thirty
(00:24):
six point two million Latinos are expected to vote in
the twenty twenty four presidential election, four million more voters
than in the twenty twenty election. According to the Pew
Research Center, Latino voters have tended to have low turnout
rates and elections, but this hefty increase in that electoral
pool is due to the mobilization of enthusiastic and engaged,
(00:46):
younger US born Latino voters, and you'll find that growth
concentrated in swing states in the Western US like Nevada
and Arizona. Forty five percent of all eligible voters in
New Mexico are Latina knows, and California is home to
about twenty five percent of all eligible Latino voters in
the entire US. Latino voters have strong regional differences in
(01:10):
their cultures and values, and this plays out around what
they care about entrepreneurial opportunities, abortion, voting rights, citizenship, immigration,
and other issues are front and center. Latino voters played
a pivotal role in Joe Biden's twenty twenty victory, and
they will figure prominently in a twenty twenty four presidential
race in which Donald Trump can leverage strides he's made
(01:33):
courting them. The both work hard to woo Latinos, and
the race could be decided in part by who's the
most successful. I'm happy to tell you that Maria Teresa
Kumar joins me today to dig into all of this.
Maria Theresa is the CEO of Voto Latino, an influential
advocacy group that mobilizes Latino voters around a range of issues.
(01:54):
It's been so successful that is now the largest voter
registration group in the ipocket community and among youth voters.
Greetings Maria Theresa.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Tim, I'm thrilled to be here.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
I just wanted to tee this off by asking you,
in the most general of ways, what's at stake for
Latino voters in the twenty twenty four election.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
That is such an all encompassing question, because I would say, Tim,
that it is no different than that of our neighbors
as American citizens. And one of the things that we
saw under the Donald Trump reign was that he put
Latino's front and center as the experiment of what he'd
like to do with the rest of Americans. And I'd
(02:38):
say this not lightly. We were absolutely the canaries in
the coal mine when he descended that escalator and basically
said that we were criminals and rapists. He tried to
be too smart by half saying that it was the
person crossing the border from Mexico. But there was not
a Latino in America who understood that he meant us.
And then he denigrated every single institution. When he went
(03:01):
first after a Latino reporter of hore Ramos, that was
his indication that he was going to go after the
press as a whole, and we saw that when he
was in office. Then we saw him go after a
Mexican judge, and we saw his playbook that he was
intending to do that for all of the judicial branch.
And if we were to take his word of what
(03:22):
he has now claimed in the New York Times, he
intends to concentrate power and make America a democracy on
paper only, and so while we have absolutely the Latino
community been at his cross hairs. First, we are the
litmus test of what he intends to do with our
democratic institutions as a whole. And so when he speaks,
(03:44):
you and I both took him seriously. From the onset.
We saw many colleagues kind of shrike him off as
a joke. But if someone tells you who you are,
you believe him the first time. And boy, has he
fulfilled everything he said he was.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
Yeah, there should be a little question in people's mind
about who Donald Trump is and what he intends to do.
There's enough evidence now. People might have skated on that
in twenty sixteen, if they didn't read or listen, they
might have gotten away with that. But you know no
longer and you know. And why should other voting groups
be concerned about all of this, whether they're Asian America
(04:18):
voters or black voters or white voters. What is the
common thread or the commonalty here that each group should
pay attention to.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
I would say that one of the reasons that immigrants
fled and are here because they recognized that they had
a deep entrepreneurial spirit, but perhaps no connections. And in America,
if you have a good, fine idea, it has a shot.
In Latin America, you don't have a shot at all
at your big dreams because you are immediately born into
a class, whether you like it or not, and you're
(04:50):
immediately born into a corrupt system that you may have
a great idea, but you're going to have to grease
the hands of someone as little as the cable guy
to put in your internet connection so that you can
go ahead and found your company. And so when folks say, well,
what is Donald Trump? You know, why is he such
a threat to democracy? I also like to say we
(05:11):
often talk about the rights that he has said that
he's going to abdicate, whether it's a woman's rights and
agencies over her body through abortion, whether it's condoning book
banning so that we don't know our history. We can
talk about those rights as fundamentals, but then we should
also look at the rights of what makes America a
thriving democracy, and it is because we believe in a capitalist,
(05:34):
just system. Do we actually achieve that every day? No?
Are we aspirational? Absolutely? And when folks from business Tim
and I say this because you're with Bloomberg, often say, well,
Donald Trump or Biden doesn't really make a difference. I
always counteract. Is like the reason that we were able
to be the first people on the moon, the reason
(05:55):
that we were able to have an iPhone in our pocket,
the reason that we have been at the cutting edge
of research is that the government has been out of
our business to think big as an individual. But the
moment that you have in isocrasy that disrupts the ability
for the little person with big ideas to break through
because under the autocracy system, it depends on what favors
(06:18):
you will do to your local government and to the
top of the government and to part of the party.
We can say that it's one of the reasons why Russia,
being as large as it is, has not been able
to thrive because it is an oligarchy. The reason that
communist China every time there's a big idea look at
Ali Baba, it has dampened its ability to compete in
commerce in large part. And why you have so many
(06:41):
middle class Chinese fleeing right now is that they have
now hit a level of what they can and cannot
do in their country. And so in thriving democracy is
dependent on a thriving middle class with the ability to
think big as an entrepreneur.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
I would add to the great point you made about
how the US can excel spanned opportunities and take on
challenges is because of our diversity. We have an innovative economy,
and innovation comes from new ideas, and it comes from
a plurality of ideas, and those ideas and that innovation
are only as strong as the diversity of the population
(07:16):
they represent, which is another reason why immigration is key
to both US democracy and US opportunity and US economic growth.
Which anyone who really digs into this nos and anyone
who denies it as in telling the truth. In the
same way that Donald Trump said he'll be dictator on
day one, and we know he might be dictator for
thousands and thousands of days. Speaking of opportunity, you know
(07:40):
your story I find inspiring and interesting. You were born
in Colombia, then your family moved to California. You went
to college at UC Davis and then graduate school at Harvard.
Along the way, you became a legislative aid before joining
Voto Latino. So tell me a little bit about how
do you think about all that looking back at it now?
Speaker 2 (08:03):
So just to backup a few steps. My mother was
a single mom in Colombia. She was Afro Colombian and
had an eighth grade education. By all those metrics, tim
I shouldn't be where I am today because I was
born into a system that was already stacked against me
(08:23):
for all of the legacy of what it means to
be black in Colombia. My mother met my father, who
adopted me when I was one year old, shortly after
he met my mother, and they got married, though he
got really ill, and so my parents had to pack
their bags and move from a very solidly middle class
(08:43):
in Colombia to northern California, where I like to say
prepared me for the moment of Donald Trump. And I
say this because my grandparents did not have their wits
about them. That my father shows up with Latina and
her daughter and their only interaction, quite frankly, with Latinos
at the time were the migrant workers that worked their fields.
(09:07):
And so while my father convalesced, I was three at
the time, I navigated a household that was already trying
to define who I was, but who loved us nonetheless,
and set my mother to work in the field. You
can imagine how awkward that was for Thanksgiving, but it
started informing me also of the possibility that America offered me.
(09:29):
I will never forget. My proudest moment was when I
was nine years old and I had just come back
from city hall in San Francisco, and the teacher asked
what we were thankful for, and I raised my hand
very proudly saying that I was thankful that today I
was an American citizen. I believe that it meant so
much for me to be able to unopen these possibilities
(09:51):
that I knew at a very young age in Colombia
were closed. My mother worked very hard to help make
THENDS me But then I went to UC Davis and
my world opened up.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
And you took great advantage of those opportunities that came your.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Way, Oh Tim, I was hungry because I will tell
you that I knew that it was through education and
through access that I was going to be able to
have a different life, not for myself, but for the
family that I wanted in the future.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
If that makes sense, it does make sense. And I
also love your use of the word hungry because it's
so evocative, right, It's you know, literal hunger for food.
It's intellectual hunger for new ideas, it's hungry for new opportunities.
And I think a lot of people can be hungry.
Not every one of them feeds themselves in the way
that you have and the other things that you talk
(10:41):
about about your direct experience as an immigrant. You know,
I'm an Irish American, many generations removed. I think my
relatives first came over in the eighteen thirties or the
eighteen forties. And I think recent waves of immigrant Americans,
because we are an immigrant country by definition, forget that
we have this commonality, because we've gotten ours, whether that's
(11:02):
economic or cultural, or spiritual or political, the legacy migrants
have put their stakes in the ground, and I find
it troubling when they don't read their own history and
look at actually the important bonds they share with newer
generations of migrants.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Well, I think you spark something oftentimes people like to
And this was really very much unleashed by Donald Trump,
but I would say Sarah Palin had a hand in
it as well. This idea of how immigrants are the
challenge in America, and in fact, what we've been able
to demonstrate throughout history, whether we're talking about Irish Americans,
whether we're talking about Chinese Americans, and the list goes
(11:42):
on that, in fact, what we've been able to do
so differently than the rest of the world is bring
in the most innovative entrepreneurs. And they may not be
entrepreneurs in our sense, but they're entrepreneurs in that they've
recognized that they're fleeing something that is in just or
so stacked that they come to the United States because
(12:04):
they think that here they could become the best versions
of themselves. And as a result, in a multicultural America,
we all profit from it. And I often say Tim
that you don't have to take my word for it.
You don't have to take my word that multicultural America
is our superpower in an increasingly global world. You just
have to take nefarious activities of foreign actors who tried
(12:27):
to divide us in elections through race. There's well documented
that the Russians did massive interference in our twenty sixteen election,
and it was all around race. And it's because they
recognize that a divide in America is a weakened America,
but a collective, strong, multicultural America is the one that
(12:47):
we'll be able to actually map the next hundred years,
not just for the United States, but for the globe.
And while we may not be completely satisfied in attaining
what our founding fathers saw through the Constitution, we are
well ahead of everybody else, and a multicultural America will
demand collectively that we continue trying to achieve that perfect document.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
So how did you come to vote Latino? How did
that happen for you?
Speaker 2 (13:15):
So we're on the this is our twentieth year anniversary.
So I like to say we're twenty years young. And
if I were to be completely transparent, I was tragically
in New York when September eleventh happened, and I was
on the path of going into corporate America like so
many young people at the time, and I had this
realization that while I was the first person in my
(13:37):
family to graduate get my masters, and I was about
to engage in living the immigrant dream of every parent
for their child, that is different was that really my
dream was also acknowledging that my cousins who were younger
than I were not okay. And at the time tim
I did not have the language of institutional racism, but
there was something very clear that the women in my
(13:58):
family were thriving, and the young men in my family
were not. And we grew up in Sonoma, the liberal
bastion was as segregated as you could possibly imagine. And
I stepped back and I realized, I'm about to go
into corporate America to give people who have access in
information more access and information. And anyone can do that.
But at this point I had a set of values
(14:21):
that I felt that if we can enfranchise and start
talking to young people about the importance of their democracy
and how they fit into it and how they can
help self define themselves and their family by participating, that
we could have a revolution for good and it can
be transformative. And about a year later, I was talking
to a mentor of mine and he introduced me to
Rosario Dawson, who had just launched a campaign called Voda
(14:45):
Latino with MTV. And that's all it was supposed to be,
tim it wasn't supposed to be anything more. And I
saw this ad and granted I had worked in Congress,
I'd gone to the Kennedy School, I had been interning
the sacrament of State Legislature when I was in college.
I would consider myself highly political, but it wasn't until
I was twenty eight years old when I saw one
(15:05):
of the PSAs where one of the actors was looking
straight to the camera say registered to vote because I
can't that I finally felt seen that, I finally felt
someone say you are Latina and American and what a
beautiful thing, and what's the power. And it was that
advocacy that I realized that this is where I wanted
(15:26):
to spend my time, and so, believe it or not,
I quit my job. I moved back home to my
mom on the eve of my thirtieth birthday, and I
funded an underwrite vit Latino for the first three years
on my credit card. Whoever's hearing this, don't ever do
that this is a terrible idea. But it was this
deep understanding that I had navigated America for my mom
(15:49):
since I was nine years old, and there were millions
of other young people doing the same thing. And while
Latinos are the second fastest group of growing Americans, we're
also the second largest of Americans. And for the last
two census tim it's been because of the Latino growth.
Fifty two percent of the US population growth has been
attributed to Latinos, not immigration, but the birth of American Latinos.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
If you can, in a kind of a direct and
succinct way, tell me a little bit about what your
involvement in Voda Latino meant to you as an activist
and someone who was deeply politicized.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
So when I inherited Vota Latino, it was just an
idea in PSAs, and it was the first organization to
speak to me as an American, and I fell in
love with its possibility because I knew that when I
was underage, I was navigating this country for my mother,
(16:48):
for my grandmother by translating everywhere, and I knew that
millions of other Latino youths were doing the exact same thing,
and they didn't realize that at the time that when
they turned eighteen, all of a sudden, they would have
greater agency to impact their families than through simple translation,
by really navigating the country, by basically registering to vote,
(17:13):
registering their families and changing dynamics in this country.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
And understanding the tools that they needed to use to
empower themselves.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
That's exactly the vote.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
Alone, although it's an important one, but you brought many
other organizing principles to bear on that effort.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
That's exactly right. One of the things that if you
were to ask what makes us principally so different from
other voter registrations, I would define us more as a
civic education and advocacy organization, because not only do we
register you to vote, but then we inform you about
the issues that matter to you, and then we teach
you how to take action. We don't leave you the
next day, but we really create a community. And what's
(17:50):
neat is that if you were to go into Texas
and ask a seventeen year old if they know Little Latino,
almost seven out of ten will say that they do.
We've been able to say see how young people, once
they recognize that the levers of power really lie in
their hands, they participate and they start changing the direction
(18:11):
of their states.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
So on that happy note of both brand recognition among
voters and your great organizing effort, I want to take
a quick break so we can hear from a sponsor,
and then we'll come right back. I'm back with Maria
Theresa Kumar, CEO of vot Latino, and we're talking about
(18:33):
the power and promise of Latino voters in the US.
You've just been regaling me with both your poignant and
powerful personal story of how you became a voter organizer
within the Latino community, and then Voto Latino's own strides
in both the depth of its representation across a number
of states and the variety of issues that it embraces
(18:55):
and advocates for. On that note, can we talk a
little bit about demographic You know, I think many Americans,
particularly white Americans, think of Latinos as this big homogeneous
block of people doing something here there, And it's a
richly diverse, geographically dispersed community. And that's important, I think
in understanding that communities interests as voters and its needs
(19:19):
as citizens.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
Right absolutely. And I think one of the things is
tim that most fellow Americans don't know is how young
the population is. So according to a Peuce study that
came out a few years ago, the most common age
among whites is fifty eight, the most common age among
African Americans is thirty three, But the most common age
(19:40):
among Latinos. I'll give you a guess.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
Well, I'm well, since you've set me up, I'm going
to say twenty.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
Two, eleven years old.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Oh my gosh, I wasn't even close, and.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
Most folks aren't, right. I mean, I asked the same
question in Little Rock with a conversation we were having
with Hillary Clinton and her crowd, and I have to
tell you that when I said eleven years old, she
included gasped. But it also speaks to the moment we're in.
It speaks to the moment where you have voter suppression
(20:11):
laws that are trying to beat back not the voter today,
but the voter that's coming. It wasn't until twenty eighteen
that Latinas became the second largest demographic of voters. We
have a Latino voter turning eighteen every thirty seconds in
this country. And they are not on the coasts, but
(20:32):
they're in the eight states where we have focused on.
They are in Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Texas.
We can park Florida there for a second, but this
is what's really interesting. In a place like Arizona, where
the Latino vote is close to forty percent of the vote,
(20:53):
what's just as interesting is that thirty five percent of
them are young people under the age of twenty nine.
In twenty twenty, vote Latino proudly registered and turned out
thirty two thousand Arizonans. Nineteen thousand were first time voters.
Biden won by less than twelve thousand votes. But guess
what the opportunity is in Arizona alone. We're expecting one
(21:17):
hundred and sixty three thousand young people to have turned
eighteen in the last four years, so more than ten
times the margin of victory that Biden squeaked by.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
And tell me, they also tend to be more engaged
with the process than their parents or their grandparents, right, Like,
they're less extisent about expressing themselves politically, about registering to vote,
about actually voting, which is a huge cultural and democratic
change that's fundamental.
Speaker 2 (21:47):
Right Well, and this is where people like to say, well,
we see that Latinos are turning to the right, and
that's not the case, because the older Latinos, even they
sixty percent of them voted for Biden. They did. Seventy
percent of young people voted for Biden in the last election.
But what we find is that people don't talk to
young people because they don't recognize how engaged they are
(22:11):
on the issues of gun safety, the environment, student loans, abortion, abortion,
right abortion, and so when people say, well, Latinos don't
care about abortion, said, the majority of Latinos are thirty
year old women. They don't want the government deciding what
their trajectory should right. They care because that eleven year
old is their kid, right, the one that I was
(22:33):
talking to you about. Right. And this is where I
think media and people in power really need to check
their biases at the door, because for so many years
we keep hearing that Latinos are deeply Catholic and therefore
anti abortion. But even though we're deeply Catholic, we are
Pope Francis Catholic who has been a leader and a
(22:54):
champion for social justice, for environmental movements, and yes for
recognizing that you should not shame a woman if they
have an abortion. And so I think that that's oftentimes
the disconnect when it comes to how people perceive Latino's
in our Catholicism. And I say this because I think
it's very important for us to understand how Latinos view
themselves when it comes to their politics.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
Well, and it's you know, it's also sorry to interrupt,
but I you know what you just said about the
church and then media biases. One step is for the
media to think about their biases. Of course, the other
thing is to do the hard work of not being
lazy in terms of who they're speaking to when they're
drawing conclusions about what voters want. Because there is an
active group of older, more traditional Latinos who are more
(23:40):
accessible many times for the media, and it's the younger voters.
I think that it's harder for the media to access
and pay attention to in the Latino community, and it
takes a little bit of work, but I think you'd
see more of these diverse views reflected in the media
if the media did a better job of extending the
range of the interviews it does.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
That's absolutely right, and I think that unlike in the
older white community, where the majority of voters are older whites,
in the Latino community it's completely inverse. The biggest pool
of eligible voters are under the age of thirty three.
If you do not know how they're feeling, then you
actually don't know the course the country is going to take.
(24:23):
In a place like Florida, Florida is the only state
in America where young Latino voters will not eclipse older voters,
and so a lot of the media takes their clues
of what's happening in Florida, but they do not have
the pulse of what's happening in the rest of the country.
When you said that Latinos are of different backgrounds, it's
(24:43):
absolutely true. But what we have found at Vote Latino
is that the biggest commonality is not the country your
family came from. It's the state that you grew up in.
So if you grew up under our Pio's watch, it
actually doesn't matter what country your family came from, because
the moment.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
You see you're referencing the Maricopa County, Yes sheriff in
Arizona who led basically with the club.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
That's exactly right. And so the moment that young person
walked out of that house, they were subjected to terrifying
racial profiling, in some cases witnessing their parents being locked away.
And so one of the things that we did at
Bode Latino is that we identified the eight states, and
I'm proud to say that we have never left those states,
and in that bandwidth of ten years in twenty twenty,
(25:30):
we have helped flip five of them. And if you
were to look at the only organization that has been
consistently there. It has been Vote Latino because in some cases,
some of these states don't have unions, in some cases
they don't have active plant Parenthood chapters, in some cases
they don't have a lot of national presence. But we
(25:51):
went into Georgia and we worked with Stacy Abrams long
before people told us it was a possibility. But it
was because while Latita's were only two percent of the populace,
when we started working there to vote, they were sixteen
percent of the classrooms. We knew that they were going
to eventually graduate to become voters. We took big bets
tim they faded off.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
At least I think seven of the eight states you
mentioned to our swing states, at least six. I guess
I would say, I don't think of Texas and Florida's
swing states.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Texas is the biggest possibility. Can I tell you Texas
is where California what. I'm bullish on Texas because Texas, actually,
you don't even have to take my word for it.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
I'll take your word.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
Twenty eighteen. In twenty eighteen, Latino youth actually increased their
participation by twenty three percent. In twenty twenty, they came
out by twenty one percent.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
Well, now that you've convinced me that Texas is in play,
which I did not think it could be in play,
and maybe you're saying it's going to be in play
one day. We can come back to that. But on
that note, I want to take a break and hear
from one of our sponsors, and then we'll continue this
very interesting conversation. I'm back and having a great conversation
(27:03):
with Maria Teresa Kumar, CEO of Voto Latino, and we
are talking about the twenty twenty four presidential race. And
right before we took this break, Marie Theresa, we were
talking about activating the Latino vote in different states and
what that might look like. We touched on Texas, and
I wanted to step back from that in a big
(27:23):
picture way and hear you out about how you think
the Republicans slash Donald Trump and the Democrats slash Joe
Biden are positioning themselves around the vote, and why don't
we start with Trump and the GOP.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
So the biggest opportunity for the Latino vote is going
to be among young people, because that's really where the
vote is growing. And if you see where the vote
is growing, where they will make significant impact, whether we're
talking about Georgia or North Carolina or Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin,
even Texas. The thing that makes me pause about the
(28:01):
Republican's commitment to courting this increasingly powerful cohort in increasingly
important swing states is that every chance they get, they
try to put a hurdle to their participation at the
voting booth. And I think that's all we really kind
of need to know about what their priorities are. And
(28:22):
then you have in these same states very Strongmann type
of leadership that tries to escape the responsibility of legislating
for the whole of their population by trying to put
the onus on the boogheman of the immigrant communities. And
one thing that I've been able to learn from experience
(28:42):
is that when you do that, whether it is a
shriff our PIO, a shared at Angle, Thompton Crado back
in Colorado, when we help flip that state, what you do,
in fact is actually activate a community that's been a
political up to that moment, and they start participate aggressively
in elections because that voting booth becomes an SOS and
(29:05):
it becomes their pathway to sovereignty from people who are
being so cruel to their families and the pressures of disenfranchisement.
And so when people talk about the Latino vote and
they try to say, well, Latinos are going Republican, while
the pulling may say that, their actions at the voting
(29:26):
booth say something else. And I pointed most recently in
the special election in Ohio around abortion access, where in fact,
if you were to dust off of who voted for
that bill, overwhelmingly it was the black and Latino vote,
and the vote that was evenly split among men and
(29:46):
women were white voters. And so when folks again tried
to believe that Latinos are going right, I would like
to say, well, just like there was never a red
wave during the mid term, there is not a Latino
defection from the Democratic Party. If anything, it might be
disillusionment because change isn't happening fast enough, but it doesn't
(30:07):
mean that they're actually being right leading because the Party
of Trump has vocally demonstrated through rhetoric and action that
they don't believe in a multicultural America.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
And on the GOP positioning towards DHACA, the dreamers and
citizenship for migrants who are born here and grew up here,
and now our adults they have been tone deaf and
heartless around that issue as well, in lots of ways,
in addition to the voting booth issues you've brought up.
When you say you know that the vote isn't fraying,
(30:42):
what do you make of in twenty twenty? You know
this phenomenon where it was repeatedly run up the flag
that cultural conservatism and sort of a pro business positioning
within certain segments of the Latin vote made Trump an
appealing candidate, and that in fact, a lot of sensationalism
(31:05):
around socialism and creeping socialism, et cetera, et cetera was
used effectively to change the cohort and provide Trump with
inroads he hadn't enjoyed before in the party, hadn't enjoyed before.
Do you think that's just a false narrative or isn't
statistically significant?
Speaker 2 (31:24):
Yeah? So I think that is. It's learning where that
socialism message played well and where the Democrats ignored, and
that was Florida. And that is because the Democrats were saying, well,
how can possibly anyone believe that we're going in a
socialist direction? That doesn't make any sense where America. What
they failed were having cultural sensitivities that there were people
(31:47):
in Florida who fled socialism and we're.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
Having particularly Cuban particularly.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
Cubans right and now the new wave of Venezuelans, and
so we along with others, were flagging that this was
going to be a particular issue in Florida. When the
Republicans tried to take that message to Texas and to
other states, it didn't bode well because most of the
folks that their families fled Latin America was not for
(32:16):
socialists regimes. They were here for economic reasons. So it
didn't mash up, it didn't align. And when we did
a lot of our polling post the election, we found
that the folks that did vote for Trump, outside of
the socialist message, the number one reason was because he
was a businessman and number two because he signed their
COVID checks. And so you can say what you want,
(32:39):
but they could say, well, I don't know what the
Democrats are going to offer me, but this person can
be a racist, but at least he provided me some
sort of relief. Right. There is a lot of learning
that needs to happen in the Latino community. Is there
mostly first generation that a president's name on a check
is actually not his cash but their cash.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
Right, Which is actually the story of Thenald Trump's life
as a businessman too, is every check he signed has
been someone else's money.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
Who else is money? At least he's consistent. I mean,
I don't know what you heard. That's good. So anyway,
So one of the things that we learned in twenty
twenty two, if you were to see what happened, for example,
because everybody kept outing Southern Texas, if you saw what
happened in Southern Texas was that everybody that voted for
a Democrat in twenty sixteen was back aligned with Beto Urke.
(33:29):
So there was one district that flipped, but that was
the only district in Texas that became Republican gerrymandered. So
anything that was a Republican stripe was meant to win
that seat District fifteen. What they did well was that
they identified Magalatina to communicate what they do so well
(33:50):
of using her as an example that they were making
in roads. But what our data shows, and again what
Pew Charitable Trust recently was able to demonstrate too that
in twenty twenty two, the lack of investment in Latino
turnout by the Democratic Party had the Latino's participating by
thirty seven percent less than they did in twenty eighteen.
(34:13):
So the headlines that Latino's were turning right did exactly
what it was meant to do. It cost investment in
the Latino community that could have favored the Democrats in
Central California, in Upstate New York, in certain places where
racist should not have been this close.
Speaker 1 (34:29):
And so you would argue that there is no defection
taking place. It's on the edges. And what's really happening
is that the Democrats aren't committing as fully as they
should to actually grow this beautiful pie sitting right in
front of them, right.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
It is the most let's say, you know, oftentimes if
you people ask what is it that you do, Maria Tresa,
I say, I market democracy every single day. So if
you take the best practices of Nike, Nike understands that
the way they grow their market share is by talking
and advertising and explaining why Nikes are better than Adidas
(35:05):
and they're winning. If you talk to any corporate head
that does direct to consumer, if you ask them what's
your number one market that you're trying to attract. It's
going to be Latino youth because they have the youngest, fastest,
great demographic of disposable in full stop. The fact that
the Democrats don't seem to completely own this opportunity is
(35:30):
really beside myself. I mean there are places like I
mentioned earlier, Arizona, where Biden won that state by less
than twelve thousand votes, but waiting in the wings are
one hundred and sixty three thousand Latino youth to be
registered to vote, who when you pull them, are seventy
percent aligned with progressive values. That's a marketplace miscalculation of
(35:52):
wasted opportunity.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
The Rio Grande Valley.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
Yeah in Texas, Yeah, No, it's no, and it really is.
And it's not just the population in waiting on the
sidelines trying to learn a system, but it's also they
have incredible leadership in Texas, Arizona, and Nevada. The Nevada
State House for a while the leadership was all Latina women.
That's powerful. That should signal to the Democrats that people
(36:15):
are eager for leadership and eager to be talked to.
And oftentimes ten people say we why do Latinos need
to be talked to. One is, oftentimes they come from
families who have fled governments that democracy can get you hurt,
so you don't participate in those countries' governments. So there's
not a history of participation in this country. Number one.
(36:36):
But then number two, if you look at the school
systems in the US, only eight states require a year
of civic education out of fifty states to graduate from
high school, only eight out of fifty. If we know
in certain states like Texas, we're fifty two percent of
your kids K through twelve are Latino, seventy five percent
(37:00):
of them are close to being people of color. Where
is this new generation of Americans learning how democracy works.
Speaker 1 (37:07):
Well in that context? How do we educate people properly?
And how do we get good information to people that
they can act upon. And one of the other things
I've been curious and concerned about is young Latinos, like
many young people everywhere, rely on social media as a
primary conduit for engagement with the world around them and
(37:30):
for acquiring and digesting information. And disinformation and misinformation are
long standing problems now on social and I was wondering
how you felt about the role it might play in
this election in terms of being a factor that people
need to be aware of within the Latino community.
Speaker 2 (37:50):
I think as a whole, my biggest concern going into
this election is that we are not ready, whether we're
talking about through government regulation, through politicians, through the media,
through organizations, we are not ready to prepare our country
and its citizens for the deep fakes that are going
to be waiting in line. And we do need a
(38:12):
quick way of teaching literacy on media consumption. And one
of the ways that people are going to trust more
than governments and more than traditional institutions and even media, sadly,
are the people they know and influencers and corporations. When
you look at where people lay their trust, even though
(38:33):
people like to browbeat corporations, there's also a level of
trust in them that government entities sadly are not enjoying
because of the erosion of trust that disinformation has led to.
And so one of the things that vote works on
every year. We're one of the co founders of National
Voter Registration Day, and during that time we were actively
work with Walmart and Steve Madden, Zoomies and dozens of
(38:57):
organizations Universal music and such, and we provide them with
toolkits that they could share with their employees and with
their customers on basic information on where to vote, how
to vote. If they need a ride, we partner with
Uber so Uber can give them a ride to the polls.
But at the end of the day, it's going to
be everyday citizens, because you have flagged my deepest concern
(39:17):
for this election. Are people going to be able to
properly cast a ballot on the day that they're supposed
to in the form that they're supposed to do with
the idea that they need because someone else has not
gotten into their ear and told them otherwise. One of
the things that we just saw in New Hampshire, for example,
was the fact that there was a deep fake robocall
telling Biden supporters not to go vote.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
It was actually even a little worse than that. It
was an artificial Joe Biden voice exactly right, that was
well developed enough that recipients of the call believed it
was Biden on the line. And I think this is
probably like the first inning of all of this, because
it will get combined with video and deep faked videos,
and it's going to be a whole new era of propagame.
(40:00):
I know we've talked a lot about a lot of
things today, but I always like to ask guests what
they've learned as they've struggled through, or adapted or solved
problems along the way. Watching the Biden administration coming on
top of the Trump administration and now both of these
men are going to be butting heads to try to
(40:22):
take the White House back. What have you learned watching
that dynamic and how it will affect the Latino community
that you didn't know several years ago.
Speaker 2 (40:33):
So for a long time tim when I started this
journey of Litte Latino twenty years ago, I had to
tell people that they had to trust that when they voted,
that their vote would work. With very little to show
for the transition of the House in twenty eighteen, with
the most diverse group of Americans occupying the US House
(40:53):
of Representatives, they collectively passed over four hundred pieces of
legislation that was really a blueprint of how America should
lead in the twenty first century, everything from gun reform
to investing in the environment, to Women's Agency, to immigration
and a whole host of stuff. And so I was
able to tell folks look your vote works. Now we
(41:14):
have to finish the job in twenty twenty. And if
you were to tell me that Joe Biden was going
to be such a consequential president when it comes to
policy that I think is going to eclipse even FDR.
I was not ready for that. But it was because
of the collective power of a multicultural America, a multicultural
(41:37):
group of coalitions coming together and putting pressure with the
White House, the Senate, and the House of how they
expect their government to function and work. And so before
I had nothing. Now I have so much to show
that voting does work. And you know a lot of
folks are going to try to say that Biden is
(41:58):
too old for the job, but I would go back
and it's like, it's what makes him a statesman. He
actually understands the machinations that are needed to have Congress
work for the American people. And it's an understanding of
how our systems work that oftentimes the public does not see,
that goes behind closed doors and makes people do the
(42:18):
right thing, even during I would say, such a difficult
time that our democracy is facing. And so going into
twenty twenty four, my hope is is that that multicultural America.
While many of us are tired, we've been doing this
a long time. We trust that the reason we're tired
is that we actually have material results, and the last
thing we need to do is figure out how we
(42:39):
can collectively put the threat of a MAGA Republican base
to rest by rising up once again in record number
in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1 (42:49):
We are out of time today, Maria Theresa, I so
appreciate you coming on in educating me and spending time
with our audience.
Speaker 2 (42:55):
Thank you so much to Tim, It's always been a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (42:57):
Maria Teresa Kumar is the CEO Voto Latino, an influential
advocacy group that mobilizes Latino voters. You can also find
her on Twitter at Maria Teresa Here. At crash Course,
we believe the collisions can be messy, impressive, challenging, surprising,
and always instructive. In today's Crash Course, I learned that
(43:19):
Latino voters are going to pose a huge problem for
both Joe Biden and Donald Trump as they fight it
out to win the twenty twenty four election. What did
you learn? We'd love to hear from you. You can
tweet at the Bloomberg Opinion, handle at Opinion or me
at Tim O'Brien using the hashtag Bloomberg Crash Course. You
can also subscribe to our show wherever you're listening right
(43:41):
now and leave us a review. It helps more people
find the show. This episode was produced by the indispensable
Anamasarakis and me. Our supervising producer is Magus Hendrickson, and
we get editing help from Sage Bauman, Jeff Grocott, Mike
Nizza and Christine Vanden Bilart Blake Maple's as our sound
engineering and our original theme song was composed by Luis Gara.
(44:05):
I'm Tim O'Brien. We'll be back next week with another
Crash Course.
Welcome to Crash Course, a podcast about business, political, and
social disruption and what we can learn from it. I'm
Tim O'Brien. Today's Crash Course Latinos versus the twenty twenty
four election. Consider the numbers. Latinos represent the US electorate's
second fastest growing voting group after Asian Americans. About thirty
(00:24):
six point two million Latinos are expected to vote in
the twenty twenty four presidential election, four million more voters
than in the twenty twenty election. According to the Pew
Research Center, Latino voters have tended to have low turnout
rates and elections, but this hefty increase in that electoral
pool is due to the mobilization of enthusiastic and engaged,
(00:46):
younger US born Latino voters, and you'll find that growth
concentrated in swing states in the Western US like Nevada
and Arizona. Forty five percent of all eligible voters in
New Mexico are Latina knows, and California is home to
about twenty five percent of all eligible Latino voters in
the entire US. Latino voters have strong regional differences in
(01:10):
their cultures and values, and this plays out around what
they care about entrepreneurial opportunities, abortion, voting rights, citizenship, immigration,
and other issues are front and center. Latino voters played
a pivotal role in Joe Biden's twenty twenty victory, and
they will figure prominently in a twenty twenty four presidential
race in which Donald Trump can leverage strides he's made
(01:33):
courting them. The both work hard to woo Latinos, and
the race could be decided in part by who's the
most successful. I'm happy to tell you that Maria Teresa
Kumar joins me today to dig into all of this.
Maria Theresa is the CEO of Voto Latino, an influential
advocacy group that mobilizes Latino voters around a range of issues.
(01:54):
It's been so successful that is now the largest voter
registration group in the ipocket community and among youth voters.
Greetings Maria Theresa.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Tim, I'm thrilled to be here.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
I just wanted to tee this off by asking you,
in the most general of ways, what's at stake for
Latino voters in the twenty twenty four election.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
That is such an all encompassing question, because I would say, Tim,
that it is no different than that of our neighbors
as American citizens. And one of the things that we
saw under the Donald Trump reign was that he put
Latino's front and center as the experiment of what he'd
like to do with the rest of Americans. And I'd
(02:38):
say this not lightly. We were absolutely the canaries in
the coal mine when he descended that escalator and basically
said that we were criminals and rapists. He tried to
be too smart by half saying that it was the
person crossing the border from Mexico. But there was not
a Latino in America who understood that he meant us.
And then he denigrated every single institution. When he went
(03:01):
first after a Latino reporter of hore Ramos, that was
his indication that he was going to go after the
press as a whole, and we saw that when he
was in office. Then we saw him go after a
Mexican judge, and we saw his playbook that he was
intending to do that for all of the judicial branch.
And if we were to take his word of what
(03:22):
he has now claimed in the New York Times, he
intends to concentrate power and make America a democracy on
paper only, and so while we have absolutely the Latino
community been at his cross hairs. First, we are the
litmus test of what he intends to do with our
democratic institutions as a whole. And so when he speaks,
(03:44):
you and I both took him seriously. From the onset.
We saw many colleagues kind of shrike him off as
a joke. But if someone tells you who you are,
you believe him the first time. And boy, has he
fulfilled everything he said he was.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
Yeah, there should be a little question in people's mind
about who Donald Trump is and what he intends to do.
There's enough evidence now. People might have skated on that
in twenty sixteen, if they didn't read or listen, they
might have gotten away with that. But you know no
longer and you know. And why should other voting groups
be concerned about all of this, whether they're Asian America
(04:18):
voters or black voters or white voters. What is the
common thread or the commonalty here that each group should
pay attention to.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
I would say that one of the reasons that immigrants
fled and are here because they recognized that they had
a deep entrepreneurial spirit, but perhaps no connections. And in America,
if you have a good, fine idea, it has a shot.
In Latin America, you don't have a shot at all
at your big dreams because you are immediately born into
a class, whether you like it or not, and you're
(04:50):
immediately born into a corrupt system that you may have
a great idea, but you're going to have to grease
the hands of someone as little as the cable guy
to put in your internet connection so that you can
go ahead and found your company. And so when folks say, well,
what is Donald Trump? You know, why is he such
a threat to democracy? I also like to say we
(05:11):
often talk about the rights that he has said that
he's going to abdicate, whether it's a woman's rights and
agencies over her body through abortion, whether it's condoning book
banning so that we don't know our history. We can
talk about those rights as fundamentals, but then we should
also look at the rights of what makes America a
thriving democracy, and it is because we believe in a capitalist,
(05:34):
just system. Do we actually achieve that every day? No?
Are we aspirational? Absolutely? And when folks from business Tim
and I say this because you're with Bloomberg, often say, well,
Donald Trump or Biden doesn't really make a difference. I
always counteract. Is like the reason that we were able
to be the first people on the moon, the reason
(05:55):
that we were able to have an iPhone in our pocket,
the reason that we have been at the cutting edge
of research is that the government has been out of
our business to think big as an individual. But the
moment that you have in isocrasy that disrupts the ability
for the little person with big ideas to break through
because under the autocracy system, it depends on what favors
(06:18):
you will do to your local government and to the
top of the government and to part of the party.
We can say that it's one of the reasons why Russia,
being as large as it is, has not been able
to thrive because it is an oligarchy. The reason that
communist China every time there's a big idea look at
Ali Baba, it has dampened its ability to compete in
commerce in large part. And why you have so many
(06:41):
middle class Chinese fleeing right now is that they have
now hit a level of what they can and cannot
do in their country. And so in thriving democracy is
dependent on a thriving middle class with the ability to
think big as an entrepreneur.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
I would add to the great point you made about
how the US can excel spanned opportunities and take on
challenges is because of our diversity. We have an innovative economy,
and innovation comes from new ideas, and it comes from
a plurality of ideas, and those ideas and that innovation
are only as strong as the diversity of the population
(07:16):
they represent, which is another reason why immigration is key
to both US democracy and US opportunity and US economic growth.
Which anyone who really digs into this nos and anyone
who denies it as in telling the truth. In the
same way that Donald Trump said he'll be dictator on
day one, and we know he might be dictator for
thousands and thousands of days. Speaking of opportunity, you know
(07:40):
your story I find inspiring and interesting. You were born
in Colombia, then your family moved to California. You went
to college at UC Davis and then graduate school at Harvard.
Along the way, you became a legislative aid before joining
Voto Latino. So tell me a little bit about how
do you think about all that looking back at it now?
Speaker 2 (08:03):
So just to backup a few steps. My mother was
a single mom in Colombia. She was Afro Colombian and
had an eighth grade education. By all those metrics, tim
I shouldn't be where I am today because I was
born into a system that was already stacked against me
(08:23):
for all of the legacy of what it means to
be black in Colombia. My mother met my father, who
adopted me when I was one year old, shortly after
he met my mother, and they got married, though he
got really ill, and so my parents had to pack
their bags and move from a very solidly middle class
(08:43):
in Colombia to northern California, where I like to say
prepared me for the moment of Donald Trump. And I
say this because my grandparents did not have their wits
about them. That my father shows up with Latina and
her daughter and their only interaction, quite frankly, with Latinos
at the time were the migrant workers that worked their fields.
(09:07):
And so while my father convalesced, I was three at
the time, I navigated a household that was already trying
to define who I was, but who loved us nonetheless,
and set my mother to work in the field. You
can imagine how awkward that was for Thanksgiving, but it
started informing me also of the possibility that America offered me.
(09:29):
I will never forget. My proudest moment was when I
was nine years old and I had just come back
from city hall in San Francisco, and the teacher asked
what we were thankful for, and I raised my hand
very proudly saying that I was thankful that today I
was an American citizen. I believe that it meant so
much for me to be able to unopen these possibilities
(09:51):
that I knew at a very young age in Colombia
were closed. My mother worked very hard to help make
THENDS me But then I went to UC Davis and
my world opened up.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
And you took great advantage of those opportunities that came your.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Way, Oh Tim, I was hungry because I will tell
you that I knew that it was through education and
through access that I was going to be able to
have a different life, not for myself, but for the
family that I wanted in the future.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
If that makes sense, it does make sense. And I
also love your use of the word hungry because it's
so evocative, right, It's you know, literal hunger for food.
It's intellectual hunger for new ideas, it's hungry for new opportunities.
And I think a lot of people can be hungry.
Not every one of them feeds themselves in the way
that you have and the other things that you talk
(10:41):
about about your direct experience as an immigrant. You know,
I'm an Irish American, many generations removed. I think my
relatives first came over in the eighteen thirties or the
eighteen forties. And I think recent waves of immigrant Americans,
because we are an immigrant country by definition, forget that
we have this commonality, because we've gotten ours, whether that's
(11:02):
economic or cultural, or spiritual or political, the legacy migrants
have put their stakes in the ground, and I find
it troubling when they don't read their own history and
look at actually the important bonds they share with newer
generations of migrants.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Well, I think you spark something oftentimes people like to
And this was really very much unleashed by Donald Trump,
but I would say Sarah Palin had a hand in
it as well. This idea of how immigrants are the
challenge in America, and in fact, what we've been able
to demonstrate throughout history, whether we're talking about Irish Americans,
whether we're talking about Chinese Americans, and the list goes
(11:42):
on that, in fact, what we've been able to do
so differently than the rest of the world is bring
in the most innovative entrepreneurs. And they may not be
entrepreneurs in our sense, but they're entrepreneurs in that they've
recognized that they're fleeing something that is in just or
so stacked that they come to the United States because
(12:04):
they think that here they could become the best versions
of themselves. And as a result, in a multicultural America,
we all profit from it. And I often say Tim
that you don't have to take my word for it.
You don't have to take my word that multicultural America
is our superpower in an increasingly global world. You just
have to take nefarious activities of foreign actors who tried
(12:27):
to divide us in elections through race. There's well documented
that the Russians did massive interference in our twenty sixteen election,
and it was all around race. And it's because they
recognize that a divide in America is a weakened America,
but a collective, strong, multicultural America is the one that
(12:47):
we'll be able to actually map the next hundred years,
not just for the United States, but for the globe.
And while we may not be completely satisfied in attaining
what our founding fathers saw through the Constitution, we are
well ahead of everybody else, and a multicultural America will
demand collectively that we continue trying to achieve that perfect document.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
So how did you come to vote Latino? How did
that happen for you?
Speaker 2 (13:15):
So we're on the this is our twentieth year anniversary.
So I like to say we're twenty years young. And
if I were to be completely transparent, I was tragically
in New York when September eleventh happened, and I was
on the path of going into corporate America like so
many young people at the time, and I had this
realization that while I was the first person in my
(13:37):
family to graduate get my masters, and I was about
to engage in living the immigrant dream of every parent
for their child, that is different was that really my
dream was also acknowledging that my cousins who were younger
than I were not okay. And at the time tim
I did not have the language of institutional racism, but
there was something very clear that the women in my
(13:58):
family were thriving, and the young men in my family
were not. And we grew up in Sonoma, the liberal
bastion was as segregated as you could possibly imagine. And
I stepped back and I realized, I'm about to go
into corporate America to give people who have access in
information more access and information. And anyone can do that.
But at this point I had a set of values
(14:21):
that I felt that if we can enfranchise and start
talking to young people about the importance of their democracy
and how they fit into it and how they can
help self define themselves and their family by participating, that
we could have a revolution for good and it can
be transformative. And about a year later, I was talking
to a mentor of mine and he introduced me to
Rosario Dawson, who had just launched a campaign called Voda
(14:45):
Latino with MTV. And that's all it was supposed to be,
tim it wasn't supposed to be anything more. And I
saw this ad and granted I had worked in Congress,
I'd gone to the Kennedy School, I had been interning
the sacrament of State Legislature when I was in college.
I would consider myself highly political, but it wasn't until
I was twenty eight years old when I saw one
(15:05):
of the PSAs where one of the actors was looking
straight to the camera say registered to vote because I
can't that I finally felt seen that, I finally felt
someone say you are Latina and American and what a
beautiful thing, and what's the power. And it was that
advocacy that I realized that this is where I wanted
(15:26):
to spend my time, and so, believe it or not,
I quit my job. I moved back home to my
mom on the eve of my thirtieth birthday, and I
funded an underwrite vit Latino for the first three years
on my credit card. Whoever's hearing this, don't ever do
that this is a terrible idea. But it was this
deep understanding that I had navigated America for my mom
(15:49):
since I was nine years old, and there were millions
of other young people doing the same thing. And while
Latinos are the second fastest group of growing Americans, we're
also the second largest of Americans. And for the last
two census tim it's been because of the Latino growth.
Fifty two percent of the US population growth has been
attributed to Latinos, not immigration, but the birth of American Latinos.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
If you can, in a kind of a direct and
succinct way, tell me a little bit about what your
involvement in Voda Latino meant to you as an activist
and someone who was deeply politicized.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
So when I inherited Vota Latino, it was just an
idea in PSAs, and it was the first organization to
speak to me as an American, and I fell in
love with its possibility because I knew that when I
was underage, I was navigating this country for my mother,
(16:48):
for my grandmother by translating everywhere, and I knew that
millions of other Latino youths were doing the exact same thing,
and they didn't realize that at the time that when
they turned eighteen, all of a sudden, they would have
greater agency to impact their families than through simple translation,
by really navigating the country, by basically registering to vote,
(17:13):
registering their families and changing dynamics in this country.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
And understanding the tools that they needed to use to
empower themselves.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
That's exactly the vote.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
Alone, although it's an important one, but you brought many
other organizing principles to bear on that effort.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
That's exactly right. One of the things that if you
were to ask what makes us principally so different from
other voter registrations, I would define us more as a
civic education and advocacy organization, because not only do we
register you to vote, but then we inform you about
the issues that matter to you, and then we teach
you how to take action. We don't leave you the
next day, but we really create a community. And what's
(17:50):
neat is that if you were to go into Texas
and ask a seventeen year old if they know Little Latino,
almost seven out of ten will say that they do.
We've been able to say see how young people, once
they recognize that the levers of power really lie in
their hands, they participate and they start changing the direction
(18:11):
of their states.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
So on that happy note of both brand recognition among
voters and your great organizing effort, I want to take
a quick break so we can hear from a sponsor,
and then we'll come right back. I'm back with Maria
Theresa Kumar, CEO of vot Latino, and we're talking about
(18:33):
the power and promise of Latino voters in the US.
You've just been regaling me with both your poignant and
powerful personal story of how you became a voter organizer
within the Latino community, and then Voto Latino's own strides
in both the depth of its representation across a number
of states and the variety of issues that it embraces
(18:55):
and advocates for. On that note, can we talk a
little bit about demographic You know, I think many Americans,
particularly white Americans, think of Latinos as this big homogeneous
block of people doing something here there, And it's a
richly diverse, geographically dispersed community. And that's important, I think
in understanding that communities interests as voters and its needs
(19:19):
as citizens.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
Right absolutely. And I think one of the things is
tim that most fellow Americans don't know is how young
the population is. So according to a Peuce study that
came out a few years ago, the most common age
among whites is fifty eight, the most common age among
African Americans is thirty three, But the most common age
(19:40):
among Latinos. I'll give you a guess.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
Well, I'm well, since you've set me up, I'm going
to say twenty.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
Two, eleven years old.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Oh my gosh, I wasn't even close, and.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
Most folks aren't, right. I mean, I asked the same
question in Little Rock with a conversation we were having
with Hillary Clinton and her crowd, and I have to
tell you that when I said eleven years old, she
included gasped. But it also speaks to the moment we're in.
It speaks to the moment where you have voter suppression
(20:11):
laws that are trying to beat back not the voter today,
but the voter that's coming. It wasn't until twenty eighteen
that Latinas became the second largest demographic of voters. We
have a Latino voter turning eighteen every thirty seconds in
this country. And they are not on the coasts, but
(20:32):
they're in the eight states where we have focused on.
They are in Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Texas.
We can park Florida there for a second, but this
is what's really interesting. In a place like Arizona, where
the Latino vote is close to forty percent of the vote,
(20:53):
what's just as interesting is that thirty five percent of
them are young people under the age of twenty nine.
In twenty twenty, vote Latino proudly registered and turned out
thirty two thousand Arizonans. Nineteen thousand were first time voters.
Biden won by less than twelve thousand votes. But guess
what the opportunity is in Arizona alone. We're expecting one
(21:17):
hundred and sixty three thousand young people to have turned
eighteen in the last four years, so more than ten
times the margin of victory that Biden squeaked by.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
And tell me, they also tend to be more engaged
with the process than their parents or their grandparents, right, Like,
they're less extisent about expressing themselves politically, about registering to vote,
about actually voting, which is a huge cultural and democratic
change that's fundamental.
Speaker 2 (21:47):
Right Well, and this is where people like to say, well,
we see that Latinos are turning to the right, and
that's not the case, because the older Latinos, even they
sixty percent of them voted for Biden. They did. Seventy
percent of young people voted for Biden in the last election.
But what we find is that people don't talk to
young people because they don't recognize how engaged they are
(22:11):
on the issues of gun safety, the environment, student loans, abortion, abortion,
right abortion, and so when people say, well, Latinos don't
care about abortion, said, the majority of Latinos are thirty
year old women. They don't want the government deciding what
their trajectory should right. They care because that eleven year
old is their kid, right, the one that I was
(22:33):
talking to you about. Right. And this is where I
think media and people in power really need to check
their biases at the door, because for so many years
we keep hearing that Latinos are deeply Catholic and therefore
anti abortion. But even though we're deeply Catholic, we are
Pope Francis Catholic who has been a leader and a
(22:54):
champion for social justice, for environmental movements, and yes for
recognizing that you should not shame a woman if they
have an abortion. And so I think that that's oftentimes
the disconnect when it comes to how people perceive Latino's
in our Catholicism. And I say this because I think
it's very important for us to understand how Latinos view
themselves when it comes to their politics.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
Well, and it's you know, it's also sorry to interrupt,
but I you know what you just said about the
church and then media biases. One step is for the
media to think about their biases. Of course, the other
thing is to do the hard work of not being
lazy in terms of who they're speaking to when they're
drawing conclusions about what voters want. Because there is an
active group of older, more traditional Latinos who are more
(23:40):
accessible many times for the media, and it's the younger voters.
I think that it's harder for the media to access
and pay attention to in the Latino community, and it
takes a little bit of work, but I think you'd
see more of these diverse views reflected in the media
if the media did a better job of extending the
range of the interviews it does.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
That's absolutely right, and I think that unlike in the
older white community, where the majority of voters are older whites,
in the Latino community it's completely inverse. The biggest pool
of eligible voters are under the age of thirty three.
If you do not know how they're feeling, then you
actually don't know the course the country is going to take.
(24:23):
In a place like Florida, Florida is the only state
in America where young Latino voters will not eclipse older voters,
and so a lot of the media takes their clues
of what's happening in Florida, but they do not have
the pulse of what's happening in the rest of the country.
When you said that Latinos are of different backgrounds, it's
(24:43):
absolutely true. But what we have found at Vote Latino
is that the biggest commonality is not the country your
family came from. It's the state that you grew up in.
So if you grew up under our Pio's watch, it
actually doesn't matter what country your family came from, because
the moment.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
You see you're referencing the Maricopa County, Yes sheriff in
Arizona who led basically with the club.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
That's exactly right. And so the moment that young person
walked out of that house, they were subjected to terrifying
racial profiling, in some cases witnessing their parents being locked away.
And so one of the things that we did at
Bode Latino is that we identified the eight states, and
I'm proud to say that we have never left those states,
and in that bandwidth of ten years in twenty twenty,
(25:30):
we have helped flip five of them. And if you
were to look at the only organization that has been
consistently there. It has been Vote Latino because in some cases,
some of these states don't have unions, in some cases
they don't have active plant Parenthood chapters, in some cases
they don't have a lot of national presence. But we
(25:51):
went into Georgia and we worked with Stacy Abrams long
before people told us it was a possibility. But it
was because while Latita's were only two percent of the populace,
when we started working there to vote, they were sixteen
percent of the classrooms. We knew that they were going
to eventually graduate to become voters. We took big bets
tim they faded off.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
At least I think seven of the eight states you
mentioned to our swing states, at least six. I guess
I would say, I don't think of Texas and Florida's
swing states.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Texas is the biggest possibility. Can I tell you Texas
is where California what. I'm bullish on Texas because Texas, actually,
you don't even have to take my word for it.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
I'll take your word.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
Twenty eighteen. In twenty eighteen, Latino youth actually increased their
participation by twenty three percent. In twenty twenty, they came
out by twenty one percent.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
Well, now that you've convinced me that Texas is in play,
which I did not think it could be in play,
and maybe you're saying it's going to be in play
one day. We can come back to that. But on
that note, I want to take a break and hear
from one of our sponsors, and then we'll continue this
very interesting conversation. I'm back and having a great conversation
(27:03):
with Maria Teresa Kumar, CEO of Voto Latino, and we
are talking about the twenty twenty four presidential race. And
right before we took this break, Marie Theresa, we were
talking about activating the Latino vote in different states and
what that might look like. We touched on Texas, and
I wanted to step back from that in a big
(27:23):
picture way and hear you out about how you think
the Republicans slash Donald Trump and the Democrats slash Joe
Biden are positioning themselves around the vote, and why don't
we start with Trump and the GOP.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
So the biggest opportunity for the Latino vote is going
to be among young people, because that's really where the
vote is growing. And if you see where the vote
is growing, where they will make significant impact, whether we're
talking about Georgia or North Carolina or Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin,
even Texas. The thing that makes me pause about the
(28:01):
Republican's commitment to courting this increasingly powerful cohort in increasingly
important swing states is that every chance they get, they
try to put a hurdle to their participation at the
voting booth. And I think that's all we really kind
of need to know about what their priorities are. And
(28:22):
then you have in these same states very Strongmann type
of leadership that tries to escape the responsibility of legislating
for the whole of their population by trying to put
the onus on the boogheman of the immigrant communities. And
one thing that I've been able to learn from experience
(28:42):
is that when you do that, whether it is a
shriff our PIO, a shared at Angle, Thompton Crado back
in Colorado, when we help flip that state, what you do,
in fact is actually activate a community that's been a
political up to that moment, and they start participate aggressively
in elections because that voting booth becomes an SOS and
(29:05):
it becomes their pathway to sovereignty from people who are
being so cruel to their families and the pressures of disenfranchisement.
And so when people talk about the Latino vote and
they try to say, well, Latinos are going Republican, while
the pulling may say that, their actions at the voting
(29:26):
booth say something else. And I pointed most recently in
the special election in Ohio around abortion access, where in fact,
if you were to dust off of who voted for
that bill, overwhelmingly it was the black and Latino vote,
and the vote that was evenly split among men and
(29:46):
women were white voters. And so when folks again tried
to believe that Latinos are going right, I would like
to say, well, just like there was never a red
wave during the mid term, there is not a Latino
defection from the Democratic Party. If anything, it might be
disillusionment because change isn't happening fast enough, but it doesn't
(30:07):
mean that they're actually being right leading because the Party
of Trump has vocally demonstrated through rhetoric and action that
they don't believe in a multicultural America.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
And on the GOP positioning towards DHACA, the dreamers and
citizenship for migrants who are born here and grew up here,
and now our adults they have been tone deaf and
heartless around that issue as well, in lots of ways,
in addition to the voting booth issues you've brought up.
When you say you know that the vote isn't fraying,
(30:42):
what do you make of in twenty twenty? You know
this phenomenon where it was repeatedly run up the flag
that cultural conservatism and sort of a pro business positioning
within certain segments of the Latin vote made Trump an
appealing candidate, and that in fact, a lot of sensationalism
(31:05):
around socialism and creeping socialism, et cetera, et cetera was
used effectively to change the cohort and provide Trump with
inroads he hadn't enjoyed before in the party, hadn't enjoyed before.
Do you think that's just a false narrative or isn't
statistically significant?
Speaker 2 (31:24):
Yeah? So I think that is. It's learning where that
socialism message played well and where the Democrats ignored, and
that was Florida. And that is because the Democrats were saying, well,
how can possibly anyone believe that we're going in a
socialist direction? That doesn't make any sense where America. What
they failed were having cultural sensitivities that there were people
(31:47):
in Florida who fled socialism and we're.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
Having particularly Cuban particularly.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
Cubans right and now the new wave of Venezuelans, and
so we along with others, were flagging that this was
going to be a particular issue in Florida. When the
Republicans tried to take that message to Texas and to
other states, it didn't bode well because most of the
folks that their families fled Latin America was not for
(32:16):
socialists regimes. They were here for economic reasons. So it
didn't mash up, it didn't align. And when we did
a lot of our polling post the election, we found
that the folks that did vote for Trump, outside of
the socialist message, the number one reason was because he
was a businessman and number two because he signed their
COVID checks. And so you can say what you want,
(32:39):
but they could say, well, I don't know what the
Democrats are going to offer me, but this person can
be a racist, but at least he provided me some
sort of relief. Right. There is a lot of learning
that needs to happen in the Latino community. Is there
mostly first generation that a president's name on a check
is actually not his cash but their cash.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
Right, Which is actually the story of Thenald Trump's life
as a businessman too, is every check he signed has
been someone else's money.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
Who else is money? At least he's consistent. I mean,
I don't know what you heard. That's good. So anyway,
So one of the things that we learned in twenty
twenty two, if you were to see what happened, for example,
because everybody kept outing Southern Texas, if you saw what
happened in Southern Texas was that everybody that voted for
a Democrat in twenty sixteen was back aligned with Beto Urke.
(33:29):
So there was one district that flipped, but that was
the only district in Texas that became Republican gerrymandered. So
anything that was a Republican stripe was meant to win
that seat District fifteen. What they did well was that
they identified Magalatina to communicate what they do so well
(33:50):
of using her as an example that they were making
in roads. But what our data shows, and again what
Pew Charitable Trust recently was able to demonstrate too that
in twenty twenty two, the lack of investment in Latino
turnout by the Democratic Party had the Latino's participating by
thirty seven percent less than they did in twenty eighteen.
(34:13):
So the headlines that Latino's were turning right did exactly
what it was meant to do. It cost investment in
the Latino community that could have favored the Democrats in
Central California, in Upstate New York, in certain places where
racist should not have been this close.
Speaker 1 (34:29):
And so you would argue that there is no defection
taking place. It's on the edges. And what's really happening
is that the Democrats aren't committing as fully as they
should to actually grow this beautiful pie sitting right in
front of them, right.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
It is the most let's say, you know, oftentimes if
you people ask what is it that you do, Maria Tresa,
I say, I market democracy every single day. So if
you take the best practices of Nike, Nike understands that
the way they grow their market share is by talking
and advertising and explaining why Nikes are better than Adidas
(35:05):
and they're winning. If you talk to any corporate head
that does direct to consumer, if you ask them what's
your number one market that you're trying to attract. It's
going to be Latino youth because they have the youngest, fastest,
great demographic of disposable in full stop. The fact that
the Democrats don't seem to completely own this opportunity is
(35:30):
really beside myself. I mean there are places like I
mentioned earlier, Arizona, where Biden won that state by less
than twelve thousand votes, but waiting in the wings are
one hundred and sixty three thousand Latino youth to be
registered to vote, who when you pull them, are seventy
percent aligned with progressive values. That's a marketplace miscalculation of
(35:52):
wasted opportunity.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
The Rio Grande Valley.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
Yeah in Texas, Yeah, No, it's no, and it really is.
And it's not just the population in waiting on the
sidelines trying to learn a system, but it's also they
have incredible leadership in Texas, Arizona, and Nevada. The Nevada
State House for a while the leadership was all Latina women.
That's powerful. That should signal to the Democrats that people
(36:15):
are eager for leadership and eager to be talked to.
And oftentimes ten people say we why do Latinos need
to be talked to. One is, oftentimes they come from
families who have fled governments that democracy can get you hurt,
so you don't participate in those countries' governments. So there's
not a history of participation in this country. Number one.
(36:36):
But then number two, if you look at the school
systems in the US, only eight states require a year
of civic education out of fifty states to graduate from
high school, only eight out of fifty. If we know
in certain states like Texas, we're fifty two percent of
your kids K through twelve are Latino, seventy five percent
(37:00):
of them are close to being people of color. Where
is this new generation of Americans learning how democracy works.
Speaker 1 (37:07):
Well in that context? How do we educate people properly?
And how do we get good information to people that
they can act upon. And one of the other things
I've been curious and concerned about is young Latinos, like
many young people everywhere, rely on social media as a
primary conduit for engagement with the world around them and
(37:30):
for acquiring and digesting information. And disinformation and misinformation are
long standing problems now on social and I was wondering
how you felt about the role it might play in
this election in terms of being a factor that people
need to be aware of within the Latino community.
Speaker 2 (37:50):
I think as a whole, my biggest concern going into
this election is that we are not ready, whether we're
talking about through government regulation, through politicians, through the media,
through organizations, we are not ready to prepare our country
and its citizens for the deep fakes that are going
to be waiting in line. And we do need a
(38:12):
quick way of teaching literacy on media consumption. And one
of the ways that people are going to trust more
than governments and more than traditional institutions and even media, sadly,
are the people they know and influencers and corporations. When
you look at where people lay their trust, even though
(38:33):
people like to browbeat corporations, there's also a level of
trust in them that government entities sadly are not enjoying
because of the erosion of trust that disinformation has led to.
And so one of the things that vote works on
every year. We're one of the co founders of National
Voter Registration Day, and during that time we were actively
work with Walmart and Steve Madden, Zoomies and dozens of
(38:57):
organizations Universal music and such, and we provide them with
toolkits that they could share with their employees and with
their customers on basic information on where to vote, how
to vote. If they need a ride, we partner with
Uber so Uber can give them a ride to the polls.
But at the end of the day, it's going to
be everyday citizens, because you have flagged my deepest concern
(39:17):
for this election. Are people going to be able to
properly cast a ballot on the day that they're supposed
to in the form that they're supposed to do with
the idea that they need because someone else has not
gotten into their ear and told them otherwise. One of
the things that we just saw in New Hampshire, for example,
was the fact that there was a deep fake robocall
telling Biden supporters not to go vote.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
It was actually even a little worse than that. It
was an artificial Joe Biden voice exactly right, that was
well developed enough that recipients of the call believed it
was Biden on the line. And I think this is
probably like the first inning of all of this, because
it will get combined with video and deep faked videos,
and it's going to be a whole new era of propagame.
(40:00):
I know we've talked a lot about a lot of
things today, but I always like to ask guests what
they've learned as they've struggled through, or adapted or solved
problems along the way. Watching the Biden administration coming on
top of the Trump administration and now both of these
men are going to be butting heads to try to
(40:22):
take the White House back. What have you learned watching
that dynamic and how it will affect the Latino community
that you didn't know several years ago.
Speaker 2 (40:33):
So for a long time tim when I started this
journey of Litte Latino twenty years ago, I had to
tell people that they had to trust that when they voted,
that their vote would work. With very little to show
for the transition of the House in twenty eighteen, with
the most diverse group of Americans occupying the US House
(40:53):
of Representatives, they collectively passed over four hundred pieces of
legislation that was really a blueprint of how America should
lead in the twenty first century, everything from gun reform
to investing in the environment, to Women's Agency, to immigration
and a whole host of stuff. And so I was
able to tell folks look your vote works. Now we
(41:14):
have to finish the job in twenty twenty. And if
you were to tell me that Joe Biden was going
to be such a consequential president when it comes to
policy that I think is going to eclipse even FDR.
I was not ready for that. But it was because
of the collective power of a multicultural America, a multicultural
(41:37):
group of coalitions coming together and putting pressure with the
White House, the Senate, and the House of how they
expect their government to function and work. And so before
I had nothing. Now I have so much to show
that voting does work. And you know a lot of
folks are going to try to say that Biden is
(41:58):
too old for the job, but I would go back
and it's like, it's what makes him a statesman. He
actually understands the machinations that are needed to have Congress
work for the American people. And it's an understanding of
how our systems work that oftentimes the public does not see,
that goes behind closed doors and makes people do the
(42:18):
right thing, even during I would say, such a difficult
time that our democracy is facing. And so going into
twenty twenty four, my hope is is that that multicultural America.
While many of us are tired, we've been doing this
a long time. We trust that the reason we're tired
is that we actually have material results, and the last
thing we need to do is figure out how we
(42:39):
can collectively put the threat of a MAGA Republican base
to rest by rising up once again in record number
in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1 (42:49):
We are out of time today, Maria Theresa, I so
appreciate you coming on in educating me and spending time
with our audience.
Speaker 2 (42:55):
Thank you so much to Tim, It's always been a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (42:57):
Maria Teresa Kumar is the CEO Voto Latino, an influential
advocacy group that mobilizes Latino voters. You can also find
her on Twitter at Maria Teresa Here. At crash Course,
we believe the collisions can be messy, impressive, challenging, surprising,
and always instructive. In today's Crash Course, I learned that
(43:19):
Latino voters are going to pose a huge problem for
both Joe Biden and Donald Trump as they fight it
out to win the twenty twenty four election. What did
you learn? We'd love to hear from you. You can
tweet at the Bloomberg Opinion, handle at Opinion or me
at Tim O'Brien using the hashtag Bloomberg Crash Course. You
can also subscribe to our show wherever you're listening right
(43:41):
now and leave us a review. It helps more people
find the show. This episode was produced by the indispensable
Anamasarakis and me. Our supervising producer is Magus Hendrickson, and
we get editing help from Sage Bauman, Jeff Grocott, Mike
Nizza and Christine Vanden Bilart Blake Maple's as our sound
engineering and our original theme song was composed by Luis Gara.
(44:05):
I'm Tim O'Brien. We'll be back next week with another
Crash Course.
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