Voto Latino’s María Teresa Kumar On ‘The Daily Show’
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
October 30, 2024
Contact: Diana Castaneda
VP of Communications
[email protected]
WASHINGTON, D.C. — María Teresa Kumar, the Co-Founder and President of Voto Latino, sat down with The Daily Show on Tuesday to discuss the run up to the election and the hateful rhetoric against Latinos from Donald Trump and his campaign.
Key excerpts from Kumar’s conversation with The Daily Show’s Ronny Chieng:
On Trump’s campaign: My grandmother says you are who your friends are. And so if Donald Trump’s friends are calling our community garbage, if they’re talking about mass deportation, if they are talking about this idea of separating families or deporting whole families, they’re talking about you, because the moment you step out that door, you present as brown, and our job right now is to safeguard our democracy. And if Kamala Harris could bring Dick Cheney and AOC under one tent. That’s a call for our democracy, right now.
On the response to the anti-Latino comments at Trump’s New York rally: I can tell you that the amount of celebrities who have come out through the woodwork has been phenomenal, but also business leaders. And this is the thing, when he went after Puerto Ricans, that comedian, he went after all of us, because in the Latino community, we recognize code. We recognize dog whistles. When Donald Trump decided that he was going to run for office because he said he was calling Mexicans rapists and criminals, we all in the Latino community heard that dog whistle, and we organized starting in 2018 and 2020, and 2022, and our job now is basically to stand firm and make sure that we’re participating. And that is learning about how to vote. Go to Votolatino.org. That’s for everybody, not just Latinos, but our allies, our friends, because we want everybody voting.
On Latino demographics: Close to 60% of Latino voters are under the age of 40. And so when you talk to a lot of Latino voters, they’re disproportionately young people. And what do I have to do for a young person? I don’t have to convince them that climate change is real. I need to convince them that they have to vote, and if they vote for the right people who believe in climate change, then they can change policy. And so when people say that Latinos are not a monolith, it’s really around generational stuff. And so it’s a matter of how do you mobilize them? And one of the reasons that we’re here today is because we’re celebrating National Early Vote Day. And the way you get young people to participate is you talk to them about the issues they care about. In this case, they care that housing is too damn high. They care about abortion. And you know what? They don’t like racists… If you look at Arizona, Arizona was able to flip for the Democrats in 2020 because you have a massive group of young Latinos coming of age. To give you an example, Biden won Arizona by 10,400 votes. Since then, over 160,000 Latinos have turned 18 just in Arizona. And you know what politicized them? Racism.
On registering Latino voters: My life’s work is trying to register voters as soon as they turn 18. A Latino voter turns 18 every 30 seconds in this country, right? So when people say Latinos don’t care… They’re like Latinos “the sleeping giant,” right? And those are serious questions because the biggest challenge for the Latino community is to close the voter registration gap. There are roughly 10 million Latinos that are not registered, and the majority of them are literally under the age of 29. If you ask yourself, why? Why do they have all these laws trying to prevent the vote? It’s because we live in a multicultural America that’s disproportionately young and has a very different worldview than the people controlling most branches of government. And so our job is to say: Look, we need you not only to register but vote early and make sure that you’re doing it in droves. Because oftentimes people wait until the last minute, then all of a sudden, if you’re working an hourly job, you don’t have time. You can’t afford to stand in line for hours, but you can if you start voting right now.
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Voto Latino is a grassroots political organization focused on educating and empowering a new generation of Latino voters, as well as creating a more robust and inclusive democracy. Since its founding, Voto Latino has registered over 1.5 million voters, mobilized tens of thousands of voters in the 2022 midterms, helping to defeat the so-called “red wave” and keep the Senate majority-Democrat. Voto Latino has also filed several lawsuits to defend voting rights in Texas, Arizona, and North Carolina ahead of the 2024 election.