Political and voting rights activist María Teresa Kumar has dedicated her career to advocating for inclusive political participation. She is the founding president and CEO of Voto Latino, the largest Latinx voter registration and advocacy organization in the country.
With Latinos being the fastest growing demographic in the U.S., and more Latinos voting in this election than any other time in history (as Kumar remarked at the Democratic National Convention), I wanted to get her perspective on the current political moment we’re in—especially in light of the ongoing racist attacks on the Hispanic/Latino population in the U.S., most recently on display in the highly offensive remarks made at Trump’s rally in New York City.
Kumar, who is also an Emmy-nominated MSNBC contributor, a political strategist, and was named one of the 10 most influential women in Washington by Elle magazine, offered insights on what it would mean if Kamala Harris is elected as our first woman president, what the drivers are for Latinos in this election, and what her call to action is between now and Election Day.
Read on for an excerpt from our interview, or listen to my full conversation with María Teresa Kumar on my podcast ShiftMakers.
Marianne Schnall: There’s a lot of really offensive commentary that came out of Trump’s recent rally at Madison Square Garden. How is this emblematic of his campaign, and how do you think it could affect things going into these next few weeks?
Maria Teresa Kumar: The rhetoric we heard at Trump’s rally on Sunday was the most brazen and proud reminder yet from his campaign about what they really think of Latinos: We are the other. We are the “enemy within.”
The comments about Puerto Rico showed they don’t respect us or our contributions as real Americans.
The comments about Latino birth rates showed they see us as an invading force and echoed the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, and multiple times we heard from Trump himself that there is an active plan to break up our families and destroy our communities.
Trump began his political career with racist generalizations about Mexican immigrants, and his concluding argument is squarely focused on making Latinos his top target.
This November, we’ll do what we did in 2020—the Latino vote will defeat Trump at the polls and deny him a second term.
If we were to take a peek at kindergarten classes today, they *are* Kamala Harris; the largest cohort of kindergartners are bicultural, multicultural children. She represents the future that’s already born.
María Teresa Kumar
Schnall: We are at this incredible moment where we stand poised to potentially elect Kamala Harris as our first Black and South Asian woman president. What would it mean, both symbolically and actually, to break that milestone and elect a woman president who is also a woman of color? What does it personally mean to you?
Kumar: Often people ask, ‘Why does diversity matter? What does this moment mean in time?’ And what we fail to recognize is that if we were to take a peek at kindergarten classes today, they *are* Kamala Harris; the largest cohort of kindergartners are bicultural, multicultural children. She represents the future that’s already born. And when you have someone such as Kamala Harris, that is, yes, a woman, yes, biracial, she also is able to go into rooms and identify issues from multiple perspectives.
Something I often say when people say, ‘why does diversity matter?’ I remind folks that in 2018, we had the largest participation in the midterm elections in our nation’s history. And we brought in the most diverse House of Representatives, the most women, the most veterans, the youngest class, the most African Americans, the most Latinos.
And as a result, if you saw what that legislative body did, they negotiated 400 pieces of legislation. That’s really the blueprint of the 21st century. It talked about codifying Roe v. Wade, making sure that we had gun reform, that we addressed climate injustice. I mean, the list went on.
It was that diverse perspective that also ushered in Kamala Harris, then senator, to help identify and address a lot of these pieces of legislation. And that is what diversity means. It’s recognizing that if we believe in a democracy and our democracy is powered by the vote, and our vote is a multicultural one, then our issues must be established by a body of leaders that reflect us. And so, with her coming into power and ideally to the White House, she’ll have the sensibility of the second largest law enforcer in the country, California.
She was elected as U.S. senator. She has the bonafides and has traveled the world representing the United States as a vice president and has been responsible for breaking the ties of this agenda that started years back. But that was really breathed into life in 2018.
Then she walks into a room with the other things that people oftentimes take for granted. The fact that she did work at McDonald’s. She is representative of upward mobility. She’s representative that anybody in America, regardless of zip code, race or gender, can be the president of a multicultural democracy. And it is a barrier that needs to be broken if we are to succeed as a country moving forward.
If we believe in a democracy and our democracy is powered by the vote, and our vote is a multicultural one, then our issues must be established by a body of leaders that reflect us.
Kumar
Schnall: You remarked during your speech at the DNC that you thought more Latinos would vote than any other time in history. As a co-founder of Voto Latino, how and why have you seen Latinos mobilizing for this election? What do you think are the primary drivers for that turnout?
Kumar: What we’re finding is that Latinos in general are very interested in the election. They are concerned with the economy. They are concerned with this ability to pay their rent and to make ends meet.
One of the challenges in this increased balkanized ecosystem of media consumption information is that different sectors of the country do receive different types of information. And for low-information voters, which are disproportionately Latinos, not because they don’t speak English—actually the majority of Latino voters speak English, but the majority of them are under the age of 40 and they’re English dominant.
The majority of them receive their information, mostly from social media, mostly from TikTok, and they consume information very similar to their generation. So it’s not a ding on them. Their generation, the vast majority of folks under the age of 35 receive their information online. But the challenge is that there are concerted efforts to provide and target them with disinformation.
I’ll give you an example with the focus groups of young women that we had recently. They’ve said that they were really concerned because they didn’t wanna vote for Trump because he was racist and he wasn’t going to be good or safe for their families. But the reason they were concerned with the vice president is because they didn’t know if she actually had the acumen of economic policy to move forward.
We heard it so much from different people, almost using the same phraseology from different states, that made us trigger, ‘wait, what are you hearing online?’ Because it’s almost like it was like a perfect soundbite, right? And so we’re now going back and we’re identifying the messages that they heard and we’re countering it. Because what we find is that once people get the right information, they make the wisest decision.
But what happens is, because of the media being so balkanized, you have a concerted effort from the right and increasingly evidence of foreign actors such as Russia and Iran and China targeting communities saying that actually not trying to switch their mind of come over to the right. Most of them are saying, ‘The government doesn’t care about you at all. So why bother?’ And that is a de facto disinformation that undermines democracy because that person will sit it out.
If we could all agree that what nurtures our democracy is our vote, the fact that someone sits it out is actually suffocating the ability for our democracy to breathe and thrive and live.
Schnall: What would your message be for anyone who you know is either undecided or doesn’t know if they are going to vote? In addition to voting, what else would your call to action be in terms of what people can do between now and the election?
Kumar: This election will have the most voters that are multicultural and the youngest sect of voters in our nation’s history. And when people say, ‘I don’t know what my vote did,’ I kindly remind them that it eradicated a lot of student loan debt. It decreased inhalers from $2,000 to $35. Insulin, the exact same, $35. You actually have all those roads that you’re seeing being built. That was the Biden bump. The fact that consumer spending is actually increasing. All of it is a collective agenda that Biden passed because you literally voted for it. You actually said this, these were my values, this is what I needed.
In order for us to finish the job of codifying Roe v. Wade, to address the voter rights restrictions that are very real and making sure we codify voting rights once again, that we pass immigration reform as it relates to people that have been here for 10, 20 years—the only way we do that is by going and voting our values. And there’s more of us.
In 2018, it was the largest peak in voter registration and turnout in a century. And then in 2020, in the middle of pandemic, we exposed our health for our democracy, and we did it again. And then we did it again in 2022. We’re tired because we’re winning, but we need to go back there and do it one more time because we need another four years to safeguard our democracy.
We should also applaud ourselves because the leaps and bounds that we’ve done to safeguard our climate, our earth based on our votes, is not small. It’s the most instrumental piece of legislation that we’ve seen in a hundred years, and the most instrumental than any other country when it comes to climate justice. If we care about Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court is not gonna budge.
The people we elect in Congress and the Senate and the White House … it will be our mandate to them. … Let’s finish it.
Between now and Nov. 5, I encourage people to remember that we are in election season, make sure that you’re making a plan to vote. Know what’s on your ballot. Go with a crib sheet. Because what we don’t realize is that when you go in and you’re like, ‘Oh, I didn’t see this before,’ we are actually responsible for making people wait in line longer. So go ready.
If you wanna learn about more information on how to vote, where to vote, how to volunteer, how to become a poll watcher, we have a website, votolatino.org, to go ahead and find all that information. Share it with your friends and family. You don’t have to be Latino to do it. It’s all very easy and digestible.
We deeply believe in democracy for all of us. If you wanna volunteer, there’s a place for you to all sign up. We do text message campaigns, we’re gonna be door-knocking with SEIU. But everybody’s like, ‘What is it that I do?’ I say, ‘Well, what’s your talent?’
You having this podcast about elections, that’s your talent. You have put on your cape and say, ‘OK, let me use my platform to bring other people along.’ That’s what we need right now. We are a beautiful, multicultural, multi-talented country. And when we put our will to do something, we are unstoppable, as President Biden says—but we need to have the will. And there’s so many millions more of us who see America in a very different light moving forward. We need to make sure that we are working as a concerted effort.
In some states, you’re already voting. Ask a friend, ‘Do you need a ride to the polls?’ Give them a ride.
There’s so many ways that we could make it fun and do it with joy, that I think that that will actually eclipse the grumpiness on the other side.
Visit What Will It Take’s 2024 Election page for more conversations with today’s thought leaders, information on the biases and barriers women candidates face and how to counter them, and links to voting resources and organizations working to advance women’s political leadership in this election and beyond.
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