María Teresa Kumar: Every 30 seconds there’s a Latino youth that turns 18 years old. We are expecting roughly 14 million Latinos to have turned 18 since the last election in key states.

Alex Lovit: Welcome to The Context, a podcast about the past, present, and future of democracy from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. I’m your host, Alex Lovit. My guest today is Maria Teresa Kumar. Kumar is the president of Voto Latino, an organization she co-founded with actor Rosario Dawson in 2004, and is today the largest Latino voter registration organization in the United States. Kumar also heads the Voto Latino Foundation, an influential Latino youth advocacy organization.

She served on President Barrack Obama’s task force on 21st century policing, and is a member of a number of important organization including the National Task Force on Election Crises and the Council of Foreign Relations. She’s also a Kettering Foundation senior fellow. Throughout the history of the United States, we’ve been a diverse country. Our population remains a product of our past diversity.

Today, Americans are the descendants of European colonists, the native people who lived here before colonization, the Africans who were enslaved and forcibly brought here, and all the immigrants who have arrived here during the last several centuries from all over the world. But while diversity has been a constant throughout American history, the specific makeup of that diversity has changed over time. In 1980, when for the first time the U.S. census provided every American the opportunity to identify as Hispanic, a little over six percent of the U.S. population checked that box.

In our most recent census in 2020, 19 percent of Americans identified as Hispanic, making Latinos the second-largest ethnic group in the United States, and the fastest growing. Latinos will continue to be a growing part of the American population, electorate, and culture over the next few decades. That’s not a political statement; that’s just a demographic fact.

Most of these new Latino Americans are not immigrants—they are the children of immigrants, and their children’s children, or the descendants of the people who lived on the land the United States captured in 1848 during the Mexican-American War. This year’s election and other future elections may result in substantial changes to the U.S. immigration system, but regardless of future immigration policy, the Latino share of the American population will continue to grow for many decades to come.

So it’s pretty important for the health of American democracy to make sure that Latinos are registered and enabled to vote, that they can participate as informed citizens, and that elected officials understand and represent the specific interests of the Latino community. This is the work that Maria Teresa Kumar and Voto Latino have been doing for two decades. And for those of us who aren’t Latino, it’s important that we respect the Latino people who already make up an indispensable part of our communities, economy, culture, and democracy.

The Kettering Foundation’s work is focused on building inclusive democracies in the United States and around the world. No demographic group has a monopoly on democracy—that’s contrary to the whole idea—but the next phase of the American experiment truly is untried. We are trying to build a democracy that works for all citizens in a diverse society where soon, no single ethnic group will constitute a majority. Talking with Maria Teresa Kumar gives me confidence that that experiment will succeed and flourish. Maria Teresa Kumar, welcome to The Context.

María Teresa Kumar: Thank you so much for having me.

Alex Lovit: So 20 years ago, you were one of the co-founders of Voto Latino. Talk to me a little bit about the original vision for that organization. Why was it important to have an organization focusing on voter registration and political engagement specifically for the Latino community?

María Teresa Kumar: I came about Voto Latino as everybody in life, where nothing is linear. Right, Alex? [Laughs] So it was right after the 2003 American family survey that declared Latinos were the second-largest demographic of Americans. That Latinos were responsible for 52 percent of our growth, and that it will be true fast-forward in 2010. The majority of folks that attributed to this massive growth were not immigrants, but the children of immigrants.

So these were American individuals that were contributing to the massive grown in the Latino community. And around the same time, MTV had just launched a campaign in 2004 called “Vote or Die”. Rosario Dawson was the—another marketing gentleman basically said, “Latinos won’t die if they don’t vote, but no one is talking to the second-largest demographic of Americans. Is there space?” So they partner with MTV and did the very first massive PSA campaign, targeting Latinos in English.

And around that same time, a mentor of mine said, “You know, Maria Teresa. You’ve always said that you’ve wanted to run an organization. This is something that might be of interest to you.” It was of interest to me because I had already worked on the hill. I had graduated from the Kennedy School of Government. I loved politics, but watching and seeing a Voto Latino PSA was the very first time that someone said out loud that, “Yes, I was Latino, but that I was a proud American.”

And on election day of November, 2004, I met Rosario. And Rosario Dawson was wonderful and charming and smart, and said, “Look, we just did these PSAs. I don’t know if it could be anything more.” I said, “How hard can it be to start an organization?” Alex, that what the hubris of a 28-year-old says [laughs] when they don’t know what they’re about to get into. But I fell in love because, like I said, it was the very first political ad that I saw myself in. And so I was living in New York at the time.

I quit my job, packed my bags, and what every parent dreams of on the eve of their kid’s 30th birthday is to get a knock on the door saying, “I’m moving home.” [Laughs] And that’s exactly what I did. And for the first two years, basically Voto Latino charted a new course. I funded it on my credit card for the first three years, recognizing that the boom of the Latino community wasn’t coming out of California—it was coming out of Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, Texas, and Colorado.

And so that is how we started Voto Latino. We said, “Where is the Latino community voting power today?” At that time, I’ll give you an example of Georgia. Latinos had two percent of the electoral base in Georgia at the time. But then we did something different. From most political calculations, we were like, “How many Latinos are in the classrooms?” And at the time in Georgia, it was roughly 15 percent. Well, that means that in short order, the electoral base in Georgia was going to change really quickly.

And I had grown up in California under Pete Wilson where Pete Wilson decided that he was going to be the big, bad republican governor by convincing our neighbors to vote for Proposition 187—which was the original “show me your paper” laws—and had a chilling effect in California. And I said, “If in California, in the progressive community that I grew up in, in Sonoma—if we can convince our neighbors to be anti-immigrant, what’s going to happen to young people and their families in a place like Georgia.

In a place like Arizona, where you didn’t have such a fast clip of community as you had in the past. And so that’s how we set up the organization, but sure enough, we became the largest voter registration organization in those states because we never left. We always had a digital-first strategy. I always date myself, because I said we started organizing on Myspace when Myspace was a thing.

And then we started organizing using text messaging back in 2006 before the iPhone. Because we recognized that young people had text messages in their pocket, they were connected to the internet, and they had free minutes on the weekends that we used to leverage when it came to peer-to-peer communication before peer-to-peer was even a thing.

Alex Lovit: So Voto Latino. And you’re known for that kind of early investment in digital organizing. Do you think that that is a strategy that works particularly well for reaching the Latino community? Is that a strategy that should be used generally in other political organizing?

María Teresa Kumar: One of the things that we know is that because Latinos are vastly so young than the rest of the population, they are absolutely early adopters of technology. They are the fastest purveyors of information on YouTube. They over-index on Twitter. They lead the way on Instagram, and let’s not even get started on TikTok. They have always been early adopters, but it’s also because they’re about 15 years younger than the rest of the country. And so when these apps are targeting young people, by default, it’s the vast majority of Latinos.

Every 30 seconds there’s a Latino youth that turns 18 years old. We are expecting roughly 14 million Latinos to have turned 18 since the last election—again, in these key states. And one of the things that we’ve never done is shy away from technology and machine learning, and targeting people using authentic communication.

And it was because we were not shy to learn the latest when it came to machine learning, when it came to targeting people online, that we were well-positioned when the pandemic came.

Sadly, because of the pandemic in 2020, a lot of our sister organizations who do the traditional paper-and-pen voter registration had to shutter. We never shuttered. We literally took “six days off”, quote-unquote, so that my team could go back home, so that they could settle down. And we entered the pandemic having registered 80,000 folks. We ended the pandemic with a record number of over 650,000 people, 82 percent who went on and voted. And we did all of that without knocking on a door. It is because we were meeting our constituency online, we were texting them, they were on radio, they were seeing our billboards, and they were receiving mail from us.

Alex Lovit: So as you’re saying, they’re a big part of what Voto Latino has successfully done, is register people to vote. And then I want to ask a little bit about that, because that process of registering to vote can look pretty different from state to state.

María Teresa Kumar: Mm-hmm.

Alex Lovit: Can you talk to what state’s policies make it easier to register, or harder to register, and how does that impact Voto Latino’s work?

María Teresa Kumar: I would say Colorado, perhaps, has the best model of how to register, and that’s same-day registration. That is a model. I would say that California, under Secretary Padilla, now Senator Padilla, he revolutionized the secretary of state to identify people that can pre-register at the age of 16. That is government working, right. If we can all agree that we live in a democracy, and that a thriving democracy, it is incumbent that every person has access to the voting booth.

What we want is to create minimal friction on being able to get on a voter role, and registering and voting. I live in the District of Washington, D.C. Literally, I can walk in on election day, and register to vote and cast my ballot at the same time. I actually don’t have to go to any specific precinct. I can cast a ballot anywhere in the city and it is counted towards me—so there’s no provisional ballots. That’s what we aspire to.

The hardest places to register, not surprising, is where you have disproportionate republican legislators who are trying to prevent the population that is vastly diverse than the people that govern. Texas, for example, after you saw close to a 23 percent increase in young people voting in 2020, the very first legislative session in January of that year of 2021, republicans passed legislation that prevented people that had temporary addresses from registering to vote.

It sounds innocuous enough, Alex, until you basically scratch the surface and realize that they don’t want kids on college campuses who are living in dorms from registering to vote. That’s a very specific group of people that they’re trying to alienate. In Texas, you also have to be deputized in your area, in your county, in order to register another voter, otherwise face criminal charges. And so it has a chilling effect, even from volunteers. And so one of the things that Voto Latino has done is we register—even in Texas, right.

Texas is actually one of our number one voter registration states, because young people have an appetite to change the state quickly. And we do it through digital marketing, and we do it through online, and we chase them and we give them conversations. But it is providing them the opportunity for them to engage and learn how they can a system that doesn’t really sit well with them when you’re talking about taking agency over a woman’s body because they’re getting an abortion, or because they have some of the worst climate change impacts that they’re facing, but very little legislation.

Or even when it comes to gun reform, the amount of young people who say, “Look, we believe in smart legislation so that we can smart gun reform that protects our families,” is through the roof in Texas. And it’s not saying that they want to take guns away—they just want better protections so that people that can potentially target other individuals don’t have access to them.

Alex Lovit: So you’re mentioning there in Texas, a state where the state government is passing policies to make it harder to register to vote. Also in August, the attorney general, Texas attorney general raided homes of several individuals working in voter registration, including members of the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, which is a nearly century-old civil rights organization.

We’re also seeing in Florida new laws this year imposing harsh penalties on voter registration organizations if they miss deadlines, and as a result, the League of Women Voters has stopped submitting paper registration forms on behalf of Florida voters this year. So it sounds like Voto Latino has been successful in addressing some of these challenges, but have these types of policies affected your work?

María Teresa Kumar: A hundred percent, and it’s because we have to inform and combat the disinformation. We have now filed just in Texas alone over five different federal lawsuits, because they are in direct violation of the Mobile Voter Act of Section 2 that is part of the Voting Rights Act. And we oftentimes file first, and then DOJ quickly follows us. And it is by design. It is purposely trying to have a chilling effect on the voter. And if we deeply believe as Americans that the way we pass policy, the way we govern, is access to the voting booth, it doesn’t matter if we are republic, independent, or democrat.

We have to understand that we have to allow access to the voting booth universally for everyone. I’m part of the universal voting task force. It came out of a project with Harvard University and Brookings. And for 18 months, I sat on a panel with people from all walks of life—independent, moderate, libertarian, academics—and we were all trying to figure out what are the best systems out there when it comes to a functioning democracy? And we looked elsewhere. Not in the United States—we looked elsewhere.

And one of the things that we found is that when we encourage universal voting—maximum participation at the voting booth—what we find is that politicians are forced to come to the middle. Because they bring in people that oftentimes say, “Politics is not for me.” So it tones down the temperature of extremism on both sides, and makes politicians actually talk about policy. And there’s not an American that I know that doesn’t want us to get back to that place, right. To governing for the people.

And so as we go through the journey, I think one of the things that we need to look at a country is that we established a lot of these voting rules over 250 years ago with some tweaks of providing more access to Americans. But in the last 10 years, we’ve been litigating issues that we had already solved for 50 years ago. So what are modernization mechanisms that we can learn and adapt to in this country so that we can get back to governing instead of having cultural wars and extreme views on both sides?

Alex Lovit: So, of course, if you talk to politicians in Texas or Florida, or some of these other states that are passing restrictions on registering to vote, passing new restrictions on the ability to vote—voter ID, for example—they say that these are necessary to prevent voter fraud. And of course, there’s not a whole lot of evidence that there’s substantial voting fraud happening anywhere in the United States. Certainly not at a level that would affect elections’ results. How does Voto Latino respond to those false claims? How should other organizations talk about that issue?

María Teresa Kumar: We will say that they have to put up these voting restrictions because of their concerns of nefarious activity at the voting booth. I remind everybody that in 2020, all 50 states—every single secretary of state, every single governor—all 50 states certified their elections as free and fair. So if they sign on that dotted line of free and fair—Governor Abbot, Paxton, go down the list in Texas—they know that there’s no voting fraud. What they’re trying to create is voting friction so that people that, all of a sudden, are participating are thinking and second-guessing themselves of whether to participate.

And we are entering election season, and I have to share with you one of my biggest concerns is that people are going to be intimidated at the polls in a manner that prevents them from casting their fair, free vote. And by doing so, we are not living up to our democratic standards, that we make demands elsewhere internationally. I would also encourage folks to know that if someone is found to have voted fraudulently, it’s a felony. It’s not a slap on the hands. You are facing serious charges.

And when folks say well, “Well, we’re concerned that an undocumented person is going to,” I said, “Undocumented person, the last thing they’re going to do is expose themselves to try and cast a ballot.” Because [laughs] they don’t want to be around any of it, right? So it’s always kind of, again, speaking in dog whistle terminology of trying to say who should have access to the voting booth. These restrictions absolutely limit young people, and absolutely limit people of color.

And that should, again, in a multicultural society, in a multicultural democracy that we are experimenting with, the only way we thrive is making sure that we have maximum participation and letting go of the friction. I would rather have folks in Texas talk more about the policies that they’re promoting so that they could ignite the imagination of the voter to vote for them, versus what we’re seeing. It’s sloppy and unjust.

Alex Lovit: So we’re talking here about one form of disinformation, which is the big lie that the 2020 election was stolen, and ancillary lies about voter fraud and other elections. I know a part of the work that Voto Latino does is combating disinformation among Latino voters. Can you talk a little bit about what that disinformation looks like, what false narratives are being spread, how are they being spread? And as far as you know, who’s doing it, and why are they doing it?

María Teresa Kumar: It’s so interesting. So one of the reasons that Voto Latino went down this rabbit hole—because it is a rabbit hole, [laughs] Alex, of disinformation—is because we realize that the real intent of disinformation is to sow doubt in the sanctity and integrity of our institutions. And if you so doubt in their efficacy, if you so doubt in their integrity that they will work for you, you don’t vote. You tap out. And so that erosion of democracy is something that is being faced worldwide, but disproportionately targeting new voters and voters of color.

And it is because oftentimes our communities are the ones that have most to lose if government dysfunctions in real ways. But if we keep showing up, then all of a sudden, our needs of our communities have to be addressed. And we started studying disinformation back in 2016. What we saw in 2016, Alex, compared to what we see today seems quaint. It was ads that were on Facebook that had Hillary Clinton texting saying, “You can vote on Wednesday, or you can text your vote. No need to stand in line,” in bilingual messaging. Facebook never took them down.

They should have, because that is false political advertising. We had to sit down with Sheryl Sandberg and others to encourage them to be more present, I would say. More thoughtful. But they were saying, “No harm, no foul”—a lot of harm and foul when you’re talking about dissuading 1,000, 10,000 votes in states that were decided by 11,000 votes like Arizona and Georgia. Right, so these implications are very real. But what we have seen since then—in 2022 what we saw was don’t vote in the midterms because nobody cares about you.

The democrats are no different than the republicans, and it was very much targeting first-time voters and young voters and communities of color that were less attuned to what was happening in Washington. And then what Voto Latino did is like, well, you say, wait a second. You say, “Neither party cares about you, but because you voted, you now have lower healthcare costs. Now you have access to $35 insulin. You have student loan forgiveness.” So we were able to demonstrate that, because they voted, there was a responsive government on the other side—and that changed behavior.

Most recently, and this was what was really wild, we saw an active campaign for third-party candidates in Arizona, Texas, and Nevada, that we did not see in Pennsylvania in Wisconsin, targeting young Latinos on TikTok. And when we did our poll back in April when Biden was still on the ballot, we found that 47 percent of Latinos in Arizona were going to vote for Biden, 38 percent were going to vote from Trump, and 17 percent were going to vote independent—12 percent of which were for RFK.

And what was surprising is that it was 62 percent of young women under the age of 35 that were interested in third-party, because of the messages that they were receiving that Biden didn’t care about them, and that Trump was too racist for them, and that there was a progressive agenda that was going to answer their needs. The moment there was a shift of nominee where Kamala Harris became top of the ticket—this was in mid-July, we saw young Latinos in particular, 60 percent of Latino voters were going to Kamala Harris, 29 percent were going for Trump, and independents went down to 7 percent.

And one could be, yes, they liked her, but part of it was that she was a blank canvas where there was not disinformation targeting her on TikTok right away. that she get the breath to define herself online in ways that, even if you look at what happened to Hilary Clinton that had 30 years of definition from the far-right, she didn’t have to deal with that. Kamala Harris didn’t have to deal with that. And so I think it’s interesting that when you ask who’s funding it, some of it is absolutely coming from the far right. But some of it, a lot of it, is coming from foreign agents that we don’t know.

There’s a really great article for your listeners if they have not read it. It is from Anne Applebaum from The Atlantic, and it’s the China-Russia propaganda machine. And it goes deep into how they are targeting election systems around the world. At the very end of the article, it was describing what we were experiencing in real time. And it was one of these things, I’m reading it, talking to focus groups, hearing it, and then I’m reading this article. It was like, oh my gosh. It was, like, too lock-step, and too prescient, but it was something that we have to learn to better monitor.

Alex Lovit: Anne Applebaum was great. We’ll put that article in the show notes. So in getting prepped for this episode, there’s this phrase that I came across dozens of times, which I’m sure means you’ve seen it thousands of times, which is Latinos are not a monolith. And, of course, that’s true. When you are using this blanket term Latino, we’re talking about millions of people across—coming from a range of countries, have been in the U.S. for varying numbers of generations.

But sometimes it does make sense to talk about Latinos as a group. Obviously, that’s right there in the name—Voto Latino. Do you have thoughts about in what context it makes sense to talk about Latino voters or Latino people, and when might that label obscure more than it reveals?

María Teresa Kumar: It’s so funny, because I am very much on the, “Folks , you’re right that Latinos are not a monolith,” but if you were to ask most people what does that mean, they don’t know. That’s the end of the conversation, right. So it’s like a nice cocktail conversation takeaway. I will tell you, again, I’ve been doing this work now for 20 years, and it is true that Latinos are not a monolith. But you have an alignment of Latino values of how you experience America, really depending on what state you live in.

So with the exception of Florida where you can embrace being Colombian and Cuban and Venezuelan and Mexican, and walk freely in Miami without judgment, you could be from Arizona and fourth generation. And go to 7-Eleven in the middle of the night to grab a bottle of milk and get pulled over for being undocumented. So there is a real sense in the Latino community that we are—oftentimes to say we are the invisible that make the visible happen in the United States.

We are disproportionately the labor, we are disproportionately the carers, we are disproportionately the ones that make the machines go on running. And that’s because the average age of a white American is 47 years old, and the average age of a Latino is 30 years old. Right. We are a young, robust, young community that people have really little curiosity learning about but are very quick to judge on whether or not we are undocumented, right. Close to one in three American, when they see another Latino, they have said that they are undocumented.

When in fact, close to 80 percent of the Latinos in this country are not only documented, but were born here. And so there has to be this major paradigm shift of multiculturalism in this country in order for us to be able to truly thrive. And again, when people say Latinos are not a monolith, I say, “Well, Latinos are very much an American context.” Because you go to Chile and tell a Chilean that they’re Latino, and they’ll say, “Nuh-uh, I’m Chilean.” [Laughs] Right? And so when you say the country is changing super fast, Arkansas is one of my best case examples.

When Governor Huckabee came to be, her second or third piece of legislation was to ban Latinx from all government forums. I’m like, huh, that’s curious to me. I asked my team, “What is the elementary school makeup of kids in Arkansas?” Because to me, that was coding. You’re speaking in code if you care so much about this term. It turned out that there are whole pockets of Arkansas where the school system is 60 to 70 percent Latino. What did she do after banning Latinx?

She’s trying to privatize education, and she’s trying to lower the labor age of children from 16 to 12, to work in factories until 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning. When people say that Latinos are not a monolith, that is absolutely true because once we close our doors, we might have a different version of a pupusa and a taco at home, right. But the moment we walk out the door, there are real barriers for us to be self-realized and achieved as a person, because of the systemic bias of institutions and how we’re perceived by our neighbors, and broader Americans at large.

Alex Lovit: Do you have comments on language? I think sometimes for non-Latino Americans it can be difficult to talk about because there’s sort of these two competing terms—Hispanic and Latino. Recently, there’s been a move toward gender-neutral language Latinx, or Latine. Is there a reason it’s Voto Latino and Votex Latinex, or Civic Hispanic?

María Teresa Kumar: Yeah. Well, first of all, we started 20 years before Latinx was a thing, right? [Laughs] And it’s really interesting, because this is where culturally it becomes a big deal. So the word Hispanic in itself was actually devised by Ronald Reagan, and so it very much became the official government term. It was a republic. It basically gave a wink and a nod to Spain as well. So if you’re Hispanic, you’re technically also Spanish, but it omitted Latin America where it recognizes our indigenous roots and our African roots, right.

So for example, I am of African descent, indigenous descent, Middle Eastern descent, and then some Spanish. So Hispanic omits everything except the Spaniard part of it, basically. And so Voto Latino was very intentional in recognizing the Latino piece of it. What most people don’t know is that the reason Reagan added Hispanic as a terminology was that, as a community, we were not recognized on the census until 1980.

We were not fully enfranchised with access to the voting booth until 1973—so a decade after the Voting Rights Act, right. So for all intents and purposes, while we’ve been here since the inception of this country, we have not been recognized, and our stories have not been told until most recently. And when it comes to Latinx, there’s a huge debate of how to identify, and it’s mostly among older generations feeling that the language is being bastardized. But I always tell my team, and I tell folks, it’s like, “Who am I to tell someone how they identify?”

Latinx is supposed to be non-binary, recognizing that there’s a spectrum of how people identify, and if someone wants to own that word, why would I take that away from them? That is their identity. And so at Voto Latino, we use Latino, we use Latina, we use Latinx, and we use Latine. And Latine is a new one, right, and that is much more textbook. Latinx came out of the transgender community, and it was a lot of young people wanting to identify and be good allies to people who identified as non-binary.

And Latine is more of the academic saying, “Well, the older people don’t really like it, and so we might as well use this.” And so it’s more of like we’ll use those three interchangeably. We rarely use Hispanic just because it became more of a government term that does not celebrate the totality of who we are as a community.

Alex Lovit: Well, thanks. I hope that helps people feel a little bit more comfortable talking about it.

María Teresa Kumar: [Laughs] I felt like that was more than the abridged version. Next time, I’ll do abridged. Sorry. [Laughs]

Alex Lovit: No, that was great. So I want to ask a couple questions about political behavior, and maybe as a way to get into that, you’ve already mentioned several times—Latinos are disproportionately younger.

María Teresa Kumar: Yeah.

Alex Lovit: And the next generation is disproportionately Latino, so if you look at Latino voter behavior, there is a bit of a democratic lean. There is also a lower voter registration, lower voter turnout. Which those are also true for younger generations.

María Teresa Kumar: Mm-hmm.

Alex Lovit: So to what extent do you think the age differences are playing into the general depiction of Latino voting behavior? Or to what extent is there something distinct about Latino behavior?

María Teresa Kumar: So I think one is that the biggest challenge in the Latino community is that we have a voter registration gap. Because in fact, when Latinos are registered, 6 out of 10 will go vote. When we register them, 8 out of 10 will go vote. But because the majority of Latinos are under the age of 33, they’re just coming into the system really fast, and keeping pace is really hard. And so if you were to ask me what are the things that I would love to see, is universal voter registration. Making it automatic. There shouldn’t be friction.

But when it comes to getting young people out to the polls, it is really giving them the information they need in order for them to feel like they have made a right decision. And so most of the people that we increasingly register—the broader generation, Z and millenials—they register independent, but lean democratic. But they don’t want to feel like they are bound by a party. That’s healthy. That’s a healthy analysis. That’s healthy of saying I want people to court me—because they should. That is actually a place of politics.

And when you talk to a young person, I don’t have to convince them that climate change is real. I need to convince them that if they vote, they will be able to make impact on that climate change issue. And because, I would say, President Biden’s agenda addressed climate change, has addressed some of these big issues that were really hard to move including student loans—they are starting to understand that their participation matters. And I predict that in the next 10 years, we’re going to see a massive amount of young people running for office.

Maxwell Frost is the first Gen Z-er but he’s not going to be the last. He’s going to have a lot of friends really soon. And that’s great for our demo cry. One of the things that I have been in awe of, a fairly new democratic system, is that of Ukraine where the average member of their parliamentarian is under the age of 42. Ours is in our mid-to-late 60s, right, and so the mid-to-late 60s does not reflect the largest generation of Americans that happen to be the alpha generation of my children who are seventh and fifth grade, right.

And so you actually want a massive amount of young people, not just voting, but really considering how do you disrupt the system. And it’s not by tapping out, but it’s by occupying the halls of power and running for office, and making sure that we are invigorated with really great, cool, new, fresh ideas.

Alex Lovit: So as you’re mentioning there, being a little bit split between the parties can be a good thing in terms of having political power. I mean, it means both parties are competing for your votes. There has been a bit of a trend through the last few election cycles of shifts in the Latino vote share. So this is according to data from The Council of the Americas in 2012, 27 percent of Latinos voted for the republican candidate. In 2016, it was 29 percent.

In 2020, 32 percent. Now, Trump is polling at about 38 percent. On the democratic side, it goes from 71 percent to 65 percent to 66 percent. Now, Kamala Harris is polling at around 56 percent of the Latino vote share. So that’s not a huge shifts—that’s a huge shift over a span of a couple decades, but it is a consistent shift. How do you think about what’s going on there?

María Teresa Kumar: So I will actually—I think this is an opportunity for us to correct the record. In 2022, for example, it’s the latest action of Latino vote. When Ohio had the abortion bill on the ballot, folks will recall that the abortion bill was safeguarded. And the reason it was safeguarded was because of African American and Latino voters overwhelmingly voted to support it. The white community, including white women, were evenly split. And so these narratives that Latinos are deflecting to the republicans, their vote behavior does not show it.

I will tell you that in 2022, there was a 37 percent decrease in Latino participation compared to the midterms of 2018. The people that showed up in 2022 in the Latino community were overwhelmingly older Latino voters who track republican, but the 37 percent decrease was vastly under the people under the age of 40. What has happened in the Latino community right now is that in the last four years, the headlines keep blaring that there is a rightward shift.

The folks that read those are people that invest in both parties, so that republicans are investing in the Latino community and the democrats basically withheld their funding. The fact that we saw a dramatic shift of a 37 percent decrease in Latino participation in 2022 was all on the democratic side. Not on the republican side. And so if you talk to your voters, which is good practice, they’re going to turn out for you. If you don’t talk to them, they will stay home.

In 2022, in Arizona where we had Mark Kelly running for senate in a tie-to-tie race, in September of that year, 50 percent of Latino voters had not received a phone call from the campaign, or from the party. Fifty percent. So what we did at Voto Latino is we dug into like, “Well, who is not being contacted?” This is now mid-September, right. Who is not being contacted? And it turned out that it was young Latino voters, and low propensity voters. Sometimes it’s the same person. Because by the rule of thumb, campaigns target people who have voted five times or more.

If your population is disproportionately voters under the age of 33, they haven’t had a chance to vote five times unless they’re voting in all the elections, right. And so by default, you are not talking to the people that are going to get you to win. So one of the things that Voto Latino did is that we basically, we were supposed to invest in five states, $4 million. We were supposed to invest in North Carolina, in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Nevada for our GOTV efforts.

We ended up shifting all of our $4 million and focused only on Arizona and Nevada with a simple reminder: tell young voters to go vote, and [unintelligible] prevent any voters to go vote. If you were to see who voted at the very end, it was young, Latino voters, and they made all the difference in Nevada and Arizona. And what keeps me up at night was that we had to shift $4 million to ensure that these folks went out and voted, but that means that all of a sudden Georgia had to be spent tens of millions of dollars for a special election that didn’t have to be.

Because I’m sure if we had to redirect our resources to these states, other organizations did as well. And we have to get out of a different mindset that low-propensity voters are not worth our time when the majority of the progressive base is young.

Alex Lovit: Yeah, so I think that’s something I hear a lot from voter registration organizations. Is the parties, in somewhat irrational fashion, tend to think, “Let’s turn out our base. Let’s turn out people that we have consistently voted.” But it’s not necessarily a long-term strategy for the parties, and it also is—

María Teresa Kumar: Well, and Alex, this is where, again, there is a Kamala effect happening at the local level. And there is an opportunity in certain states—I would say in North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada, even Texas—where the volume of young people that are not registered but that are excited to jump into the game, there’s an opportunity to close voter registration gaps. And by closing voter registration gaps, then what you’re doing is that you’re bringing them out of the shadows, and then everybody can talk to these voters.

But right now, if they’re not on a voter file, even though they’re eligible, no one’s talking to them. And so we are living in a unique moment. And this idea that—and I’ll tell you, even just anecdotally, the moment that Kamala Harris went on top of the ticket, we went out into the field. It was 2,000 registered Latino voters in five battleground states. And where Biden was at 47, she was 60 percent. Trump went from 38 percent to 29 percent, and the independent went from 17 to 7 percent.

It was the first time since perhaps Barrack Obama where we saw Latino voters pulling from republicans to the progressive agenda in ways that we hadn’t seen. If anything, the trend that we saw before was more to where Latinos were when Bush was there. Right, so it’s settling back, but she’s actually now rechanging and redefining the map to where Obama was. And that was before going into this last stretch of the election.

Alex Lovit: So we have about 10 minutes left, and I wanted to ask a couple question about immigration. So this is a big topic. We’ll only have a chance to cover a little bit of it. But in brief, do you have thoughts on things that are working well in the U.S.’s immigration’s current laws and institutions around immigration right now, and what isn’t working in the U.S.’s immigration system?

María Teresa Kumar: We have no policy, I would say. There’s no rhyme to reason to it. Most people say, “Well, cogently speaking, if you’ve been here for 10 years and you’ve been paying your taxes and you have a family, of course you should have a pathway to getting your green card and citizenship.” Because it sounds logical. But if you’ve been here for 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, you’ve taken care of our children, you have fed us, you are teaching our children, taking care of our elderly, and you don’t have that piece of paper and you’re paying billions of tax dollars into our tax system?

It sounds absurd. It sounds dystopian, and it creates so much vulnerabilities. And so what I would encourage the next administration to do is to actually identify and bring these people that are out of the shadows into a system that functions. Because it, all of a sudden, ensures that there are fair wages. It ensures that people are not being exploited. It ensures that families are not living under microaggressions of who’s the next person that wants to create mass deportation policy. It becomes very real.

And so we have two issues when it comes to immigration. One is we have yet to address the folks that have been here for decades, that pay into the system that are very much part of our communities. That’s a domestic policy issue, and that is incumbent that it be addressed. I sat down with President Biden and three other leaders in April, and we’re saying the number one issue among 22-year-olds is housing. The second issue, what is the president going to do about my mother who’s been here for 20 years undocumented?

We were able to convince him, and he signed an executive order that allowed spouses that were undocumented, married to American citizens to finally come out of the shadows and apply for simple working papers. It’s called parole in place. The Republican Party immediately sued the administration for something that’s common sense. It’s so funny, because I talked to the president and one of the things he said, “Well, how are independents?” I said, “Independent white voters want this too.” And what I did say out loud is like, “Because they might be married to an undocumented loved one.”

Right? [Laughs] It’s like really close to home; we don’t live in silos. But then separately, as a country, we need to set up a system that allows people that want to come and work here in all the right ways to apply for their visas in their home countries. And we have to reckon with ourselves that, when we say that, we’re not just talking about the doctors and the lawyers and the scientists. We’re talking about the labor. One thing that has made the American economy exceptional is that we’ve always attracted the best around the world.

Because everybody wants to come to the United States with this understanding that I can self-realize, and define my future and myself in this country, and nowhere else. And that’s what makes us uniquely American. And unless we actually have those conversations with the American people—the immigrants, our DNA, and that’s what revitalizes our economy. And that is, quite frankly, why we are the envy of the world. Then we’re not going to be able to continue leading in the 21st century.

And I am grateful, because I am a naturalized citizen. I know what it means, because I’ve witnessed it had I grown up of my mother’s birth and of my birth—in Columbia. It’s a beautiful country, the people are amazing. The government is not. And you cannot be self-realized in that country, but here in America, I can be, and so can my children. But we have to make sure that we are providing people with clarity on how the rules are. Right now, something that really stood out to me was a Venezuelan that was snared up in the system at the border, right.

And he said something that with the high-wires and all of the machines and all of the defense stuff, it’s like it didn’t look like an open country—it looked like a scared country. And I found that so impactful, because there’s nothing for us to be scared of, but we do have to create systems and practices, and pipelines and supply chains, and checks and balances. That makes sense. And there was a time when we did, so let’s go back to that.

Alex Lovit: The republican platform this year promises, quote, “The largest deportation operation in American history.” Should we take that seriously? Do you have a sense of what that would look like or what’s at stake in this election?

María Teresa Kumar: I take everything the Republican Party says seriously, except for their promise for infrastructure plans. [Laughs] That’s the one thing that never came about. Look, when Trump came down the escalator the very first time and said that Mexico is not sending their very best, and sending rapists—there was not one Latino that knew that his dog whistle was the Americans that were here that happened to present Latino. When Trump says that immigrants are poisoning the blood of Americans, he doesn’t mean the people that just crossed.

He’s talking about my family and my children. He’s talking about Americans. And when he says mass deportation, even if you were not to implement it, he is providing carte blanch to the far-right to harass, intimidate, and harm fellow Americans. And if folks think that I’m going too extreme, I just need to remind people of the El Paso massacre where a man jumped into his car, drove 10 hours, and killed 23 people. Because he was incited and inspired by Trumps tweets at the time, calling us invaders and criminals.

And that was what he wrote verbatim in his creed that was found in his car, citing Donald Trump. If there is a scenario where mass deportation happens, it is a scenario where, all of a sudden, the country becomes militarized if it’s sanctioned by the government. If it’s not sanctioned by the government, it’s basically doing a wink and a nod to white supremacists. That anybody who is not white—who is brown outward-facing, is fair game. I grew up in California under Pete Wilson. Pete Wilson is what politicized me.

It politicized Governor Newsome. It politicized Senator Padilla. It politicized Vice President Kamala Harris. Because we witnessed, in the most liberal state in the country, how our neighbors turned against each other. It was the first time I remember coming home from college, I was sick to my stomach of what I was witnessing in my community. That people were turning against my family and my cousins, and treating them horribly. These are the same people that we went to church with, the same people that we went to school with.

And I had that conversation with my family. It was like, “You need to become U.S. citizens. You need to register, and you need to vote.” It’s like I had that conversation—millions of young Latinos and Asian-American children were having that conversation with their families. And California stopped being a swing state because we got our act together and said, at the voting booth, that we solve and we create resolutions. But the interim? That was hell. I remember being in eighth grade, growing up in Sonoma, California.

And Napa, the city next to us, had a white supremacist national rally. You know how scary that is, for being a kid and saying, “You don’t know how that’s going to shake up”? The amount of hate crimes that went through the roof under Trump in the Latino community was underreported. Because if you were undocumented, or you were afraid that you were living with someone that was undocumented, you didn’t even want to tell people.

Alex Lovit: You’ve just been describing a potential frightening future for the United States. Let’s try to leave on a little bit more of a hopeful note here. And I want to ask about what your vision is for a pluralistic, democratic society. So it’s easy to say, “We want a pluralistic society in which different cultures are respected,” but moral values are shaped by family and religion. So cultural change can be scary, and that’s true for people that have grown up in this country that might feel like the culture is changing around them.

It’s also true for immigrants to this country who are seeing their children grow up with different cultural values than the world they grew up in. But if we’re going to be a democracy, those are values we need to pass on generation to generation. So what is your vision for America’s democratic future where we maintain these important values of pluralism and democracy?

María Teresa Kumar: Our superpower in America is the fact that we are multicultural. That is our superpower. We attract the best and the brightest. We are curious people trying to be entrepreneurs in different sections of society, and that’s what allows us to thrive. And our Achilles heel is racism. And that is what foreign agents actively try to use against us in the propaganda machines that they infuse across our social media platforms. But when we come together—and look, in the United States right now we are absolutely a social experiment.

There has never been a multicultural democracy ever on earth. But how beautiful that it’s happening in this very moment when globalization is far more dependent on the success of nations coming to terms with different viewpoints to thrive together. My children represent a multicultural generation—the alpha generation. They are Latina, Jewish, South Asian. And they technically represent the largest cohort of children in the classroom. Meaning that the largest cohort of American children right now are biracial, if not multiracial.

The second cohort is Latino. So our children are already being integrated in a democracy and a multiculturalism that we have never experienced. How do we lean into them to make sure that they are provided the best access of information and institutions without bias? Oftentimes, we hear this idea that we are inheriting a country that our ancestors built, and I like to actually center it around us today saying, actually, we are ancestoring. Every single decisions we make today, we are ancestoring for the children already born. And how do we want to ancestor for our country?

I want my children to have access to everything under equal rules where they present themselves as an American and not being defined by their circumstance. I want them to enter and make sure that they have more rights than I was born with, but right now, that is not the case. My daughter has less rights than her grandmother did. That’s absurd and obscene. And so our job is to ancestor fairly to ensure that they have a thriving economy, they can be the best version of themselves. That the planet is safe. That they don’t have to fear about doing drills in schools because of guns.

There are opportunities for us to take ourselves seriously as leaders and seriously as Americans, and do right by them. Because they will be asking questions. But if you were to ask me where we are, I actually think that our brightest days are ahead of us because we haven’t completely expanded our opportunity and possibility. But we are already at a level where this generation of Americans are more informed, we have more access to healthcare, we have more access to being able to build a better, brighter future collectively. And we should embrace it.

Alex Lovit: Well, Maria Teresa Kumar, thank you for all your work to bring America towards that better version of the future, and thank you for joining me on The Context.

María Teresa Kumar: Thanks so much, Alex.

Alex Lovit: The Context is a production of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. I’m Alex Lovit, a senior program officer and historian with the foundation. The episode producer for this show is George Drake Jr.; Melinda Gilmore is our director of communications. People only listen to podcasts if they hear about them, so if you like the show, please help spread the word by telling a friend about us, or leaving us a review or a rating on Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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