Latinos vs. The 2024 Election

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, 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 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 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. It's been so successful that is now the largest voter registration group in the ipocket community and among youth voters. Greetings Maria Theresa.

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 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 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, 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.

voters or black voters or white voters. What is the common thread or the commonalty here that each group should pay attention to.

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 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 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,

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 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 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 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.

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 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?

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 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. 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. 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 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.

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 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.

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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

greater agency to impact their families than through simple translation, by really navigating the country, by basically registering to vote, registering their families and changing dynamics in this country.

next day, but we really create a community. And what's 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 of their states.

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

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 as citizens.

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 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, 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 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.

But what we find is that people don't talk to young people because they don't recognize how engaged they are 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

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

even Texas. The thing that makes me pause about the 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 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 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

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

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 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 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.

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 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?

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, 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.

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 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. 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.

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

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 wasted opportunity.

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. 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 of them are close to being people of color. Where is this new generation of Americans learning how democracy works.

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.

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 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 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 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.

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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 can collectively put the threat of a MAGA Republican base to rest by rising up once again in record number in twenty twenty four.

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 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. I'm Tim O'Brien. We'll be back next week with another Crash Course.