The MeidasTouch Podcast - How HISTORIC Youth Voter Turnout and Engagement DEBUNKS Narratives about Gen-Z with Voters of Tomorrow President Santiago Mayer

Episode Date: October 17, 2022

On this edition of The Mighty, we speak with Founder and Executive Director of Voters of Tomorrow, Santiago Mayer. Santiago, an immigrant from Mexico, noticed a lack of political engagement at his high school and decided to tackle that by creating a new organization for young people, by young people, when he was just 17-years-old. Since then, Voters of Tomorrow has become one of the preeminent organizations for youth voter turnout, with their initiatives and activations frequently making national headlines and smashing narratives about the enthusiasm of young voters. On The Mighty, we feature some of the most impactful responses, reactions, narratives, musings, and rants of Meidas content creators and highlight pro-democracy candidates and activists throughout the country. New episodes of the traditional MeidasTouch Podcast featuring drop every Tuesday and Friday morning. Learn more about Voters of Tomorrow: https://votersoftomorrow.org/ Follow Voters of Tomorrow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/voterstomorrow Follow Santiago on Twitter: https://twitter.com/santiagomayer_ Shop Meidas Merch at: https://store.meidastouch.com Join us on Patreon: https://patreon.com/meidastouch Remember to subscribe to ALL the Meidas Media Podcasts: MeidasTouch: https://pod.link/1510240831 Legal AF: https://pod.link/1580828595 The PoliticsGirl Podcast: https://pod.link/1595408601 The Influence Continuum: https://pod.link/1603773245 Kremlin File: https://pod.link/1575837599 Mea Culpa with Michael Cohen: https://pod.link/1530639447 The Weekend Show: https://pod.link/1612691018 The Tony Michaels Podcast: https://pod.link/1561049560 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Thousands of new arrivals daily at 90% off retail. And right now, you can get $25 off your first purchase at therealreal.com. Go to therealreal.com to get your $25 off. That's therealreal.com to get your $25 off. That's therealreal.com. Welcome to the Midas Touch podcast, the Mighty Edition. Oh boy, I am so excited about today's episode, everybody. Because today, we are speaking with Santiago Meyer, good friend of the Midas Touch podcast,

great friend of Midas Touch. He's the executive director of a little group you may have heard of. It's called Voters of Tomorrow. They are doing some absolutely incredible work. They are a Gen Z-led movement that engages, educates, and represents youth in politics, and they are making a whole lot of good trouble. I love to see it. Santiago, welcome to the show. Santiago, let's go. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. So excited we can finally make this happen.

Of course, we say Voters of Tomorrow, the little organization, sarcastically, because if you're anywhere and anywhere, you can't miss what Santiago and his group has been doing lately. Exactly. So Voters of Tomorrow has taken the world by storm. It's really been one of the most impressive organizations that I've seen start up in a very long time. They've amassed like the most impressive group of border directors and are just crushing it. Like I cannot express to you how important Voters of Tomorrow is for youth turnout in these elections, which is why I'm so excited to speak with Santiago and just like understand

the operation, how we built it and get into everything that we need to know about youth voter turnout as we approach these elections, which are just a few weeks away, everybody. So get to work. 27 days away. 27 days. We have the countdown. Santiago has pulled out his calendar for the audio listeners, his calendar. He's got the countdown with the numbers, 27 days from the date of this recording. And that's going to fly right by. First, Santiago, let's just dive a little. Let's go a little back to start. Tell us about how you started Voters of Tomorrow. What was your inspiration for it? How did this all come to be?

As you guys know, and as some of your listeners might know, I'm originally from Mexico City. So I moved to the United States in 2017 in the middle of the Trump administration. And at the time, I was very interested in international relationships. I was a huge model UN kid. And I was very just interested in how different countries related to each other. So I moved to, I moved to the U S in 2017 in the middle of the Muslim ban. And obviously that was a huge issue. That was something that was out there in the world really. And it was something that I really wanted to talk about. So I kept talking about it with my classmates. I kept talking about it with my teachers. And the one thing I quickly realized is that people my age either didn't know that it was happening or the ones that did just didn't have the tools to talk about it.

So I started tweeting because that's what people do. So all good things start by tweeting, right? All good things start by tweeting. And as I kept tweeting, for whatever reason, I built a platform that as we got closer to 2020 and the presidential election, I decided to sort of activate to solve that issue that got me started in the first place. So we started off Twitter, We created Voters for the Department Twitter account. We started figuring out how to engage young voters. And with the help of so many people, we started, we built an org. We turned the Twitter page into an act organization.

We did several campaigns in 2020, which led us to the highest ever youth turnout. And we are currently on track to match that, match a presidential election turnout in a midterm year, which is just insane. And we're so excited, but we're going to do it. Okay. So that's wild. But then I just want to back you up a little bit because, okay, so you're Mexican immigrant. You create what starts as a Twitter account and becomes one of the biggest youth voter turnout organizations in the country. How do you make that change? How do you flick that switch from, I'm a Twitter account, we're gaining followers? Because I'm sure there are a lot of people listening to this that are

like, I want to get involved. Maybe I want to start my own organization. I know how to start a Twitter account, but I don't know what the hell I'm going to do after that. So how do you flip the switch from a Twitter account to professionalizing it and making this actually an organization that has so much impact and influence? Right. So it's difficult, right? And we're still in that process. We're still figuring out operations. We're still figuring out, we have been fully volunteer led for the past few years, and we're starting to figure out like that's becoming untenable. That's becoming something we have to change. So like it's still an ongoing process. But I think the biggest part of it is just we had really good allies and really good advisors and really good.

I had really good mentors in 2020. We got involved with a youth group that Alyssa Milano had put together to turn out young voters. And through that group, we executed prom at the polls, which I was class of 2020. I graduated in the middle of the pandemic and I did not have a prom because we were all in lockdown. So we were I know a lot of I was not particularly excited for prom,, I know a lot of, I was not particularly excited for prom, but I know a lot of my friends were. And I know a lot of people in my class had already like bought their outfits and stuff.

So we decided to kind of use that energy to get them to the polls. We asked them to ask people out from polls and go vote with each other. And through the group that Alyssa had put together, we met so many amazing people that after the election, I was able to tap into and kind of use that network

to build Voters of Tomorrow Up. So we suddenly had like lawyers and we had people who could sit on a board of directors and we had people who had a campaign experience and knew how to run something like this. So you start feeling fancy, right? When you're like, oh yeah, I have lawyers and I got people. So one of the things I've noticed about Gen Z and just young voters in general is they're really fired up. They're fired up on a level that I've never seen in my lifetime. Certainly when I was younger, I didn't see people this civically involved in

elections and everything. But I think it's because you guys have grown up facing challenges that other generations just really haven't faced. And I think it's important that people understand that perspective because, I mean, for a lot of the older generations, relatively, they've had it easy in comparison to a lot of things from the price of living to living under from Gen Z kind of living under the threat of mass shootings at schools, all this gun violence, the threat of climate change reaching record levels. Do you think that's what's kind of shaping this new youth mobilization that you're seeing? Yeah, I mean, definitely. I think the way I keep describing it is that we have lived through so many once in a lifetime events that we have lost count.

We, I mean, I was born just a few months after 9-11. We went through the 2008 recession. We went through like a mass shooting every two months. We have gone through a pandemic. We are probably now going to go through another economic crisis. We have seen terrorist attacks, wars. For the longest time, we had been at war until President Biden ended it. So we have been fully shaped by a world that has been everything but welcoming. And I think as a generation, we feel some sort of obligation to make sure that this chaos sort of ends with us rather than continuing to affect the next generation. Because like, so many of my friends are like, I can't have kids, like I can't bring kids into this world. Or like, I can't like

afford to even think about it just economically. Yeah. I love that. Then people are like, you see the pundits who are like, I don't understand why are these Gen Z, why are they not getting married and having six kids? Like we, I don't know. I don't know. What could it possibly be? It's like, dude, I can't even afford to live our own lives. We can't even be, we can't even afford to live our own lives. We can't even afford to think about buying a house, let alone afford a house. We can't afford to think about it. So it is something that we consider as a generation to be an existential sort of threat to the style of life that has for so long been kind of the baseline for people in the United States. We are the first generation who is predicted to be worse off than our parents were, which it's not really a surprise, but it's still like shocking nonetheless.

So when we're talking about all of this, like it's clear something has to be done. And given that no one else is doing it, we've kind of decided that we're going to do it. Yeah, you're taking action into your own hands. And I think at a certain point, I think you guys are like enough. Like we're kind of sick of your shit, everybody else. And we keep seeing these youth led protests that are always so inspiring to me around the country of Gen Z calling out these bad actors. I mean, most recently we saw it with the students at the University of Florida protesting when Republican Ben Sasse was named the likely new president of the university through some

secretive process. I mean, we saw it in Virginia a couple of weeks ago when Glenn Youngkin implemented his anti-LGBTQ plus protest, by the way, led in part by voters of tomorrow, Virginia, just, just have to throw that in there. Wait, when, when, when's this protest coming up? No, no, no. The, the walkouts that for the tomorrow led voters of tomorrow, Virginia was a big part of organizing those. So, I mean, that's, that's huge right there. I mean, we saw it in Florida, um, after the signing of the don't say gay Bill. Were you guys part of that as well? We were, yeah.

You were. So as you see these actions, remember that a lot of these are led by voters of tomorrow. And what do you think is the genesis, though, behind being able to get all those students out there to – do you think it's just like, hey, listen, like I said earlier, we're sick of your shit. Enough. We're going to stand up for human rights, for civil rights. We don't mess around when it comes to those things. Yeah. I mean, people are fucking tired.

That's that's just kind of the baseline. I don't know if I can curse here. If I can't. No, you could absolutely highly beautiful. Yeah. Like people are just fucking done with it and i think that's the key to all of it because a lot of older people especially a lot of people in power simply do not understand the level of tiredness and the way that gen c is fed up with a lot of these things so when we are organizing a walkout or when we're

organizing a protest it's no longer like come out and protest for this specifically, like this, this action, the, the trans rules that junk and pass or the don't say gay bill in Florida, that's a trigger. That's what led to that specific walkout. But the reason people are actually protesting is not just that it's this huge list of attacks on youth and attacks on ourselves and attacks on our identities. And we're seeing it across the country. I mean, they're banning books. They've overturned Roe. They are coming for contraception. They are coming for gay marriage. Gen Z is the most out of generation ever. One in five people identifies as LGBTQ+. This is not a conceptual thing.

These are our friends. These are, in many cases, us. And the fact that they are under attack, the fact that our identities are under attack, the fact that our education is under attack, the fact that our teachers are under attack. Gen Z is just absolutely done with it. And every opportunity that we get to show it, we will take it. Every opportunity that we get to hold people accountable, we will take it. And every opportunity that we get to vote a fascist out of office, we will take it. Hell yeah. I love that attitude. And you just named a few of them. But is there kind of one motivating issue that is really firing up young voters right now that's really making them make sure that they are involved and getting to the polls? Or do you think it's just the accumulation of just everything, it's the accumulation. I think in another sense, though, it is a single issue because it is this issue of personal

freedom. And the Republican Party has in large ways kind of taken the word freedom out of the vocabulary. And they've kind of appropriated it. But in large part, the far right is not for freedom. And we're seeing that every day. And young people support personal freedom. We support the right to choose.

We support the right to love who we love. We support the right to sleep with who we sleep with. We support the right to marry who we marry. And that is all, in essence, just the freedom to be who we are. So that, I think, is the key element driving people this year. You tweeted out, and this has been something that I've seen you say repeatedly as you do your countdown, as you take your paper countdown that you showed us to the Twitterverse, 27 days, that is.

I have never been as committed to this countdown as anything else. Every day before I got a coffee, I changed the number in it. It's my political nerd version of a plant. I love that. And you are letting it thrive as you would a plant. But you've said in regards to the amount of time that we have until election day, you've said, I can't wait until November 9th, which is the day after election day, when everyone realizes models were wrong because they underestimated youth turnout.

I love to hear that enthusiasm. Everyone realizes models were wrong because they underestimated youth turnout. I love to hear that enthusiasm. Do you have any data to back up that enthusiasm? What are you seeing on the ground in terms of mobilizing people to the polls? I mean, I genuinely do not understand why pollsters and pundits are not taking the data because it's not just our internal data. Like it's public. We have a new NBC poll today that says that 38% of young voters are definitely going to vote and 34% are likely to vote.

We have a Harvard Youth Poll from like July that says that polling is enlarged, that turnout numbers are in large part tracking with what we saw in 2018, or internal data showing that we are in track to match or even exceed 2020. We have targets more than Tom Bonnier. If you don't follow Tom Bonnier, by the way, go follow Tom Bonnier. Amazing electoral data breakdown on Twitter. He has been tracking registrations and voter registration has been off the charts for months. And all this data is public. And for whatever reason, pundits are deciding to exclude it. They're deciding to exclude young voters from their likely voter models.

And the only thing that that's going to result in is that when November 9 comes and young voters turned out and elected people to actually represent us and broke turnout records, their models are going to be bad. They're going to be wrong and they're going to look like idiots. Yeah, well, I hope we do make them look like the biggest idiots on the planet come November 9th. You know, one of the things that I'm kind of seeing, and I'm curious to get your take on this, is there really seems to be a battle for the heart and soul of young voters. And on one side, you have these really organic movements like Voters of Tomorrow and, you know, a lot of other groups that you've allied with and work with to get the messages out. And on the other side, you have what feels like these incredibly astroturfed, I guess you could call it youth oriented movements, you know, like Charlie Kirk, Turning Point USA, where they get people out there. And instead of speaking about, you know,

the positive things they want to do to help people, they have fireworks and they make it like a WWE show and it's weird and we all laugh at it, but they are getting people to these events and they are making a big show at it, whether we laugh at it or not. So how are you guys at Voters of Tomorrow? How do you guys, first off, how do you perceive those insane events that we see and what are you doing, if anything, to kind of combat what we're seeing on that end? Yeah. So i think the best way to kind of address this is by asking everyone to go look at a picture of attendees at one of charlotte kirk's events because you will see what looks like an aarp convention rather than a youth uh his his movement is by and large a a farce which pretends to use youth energy but really talks to old people their memes if you've seen their memes they're the millennial equivalent of

boomer uh tweety bird memes like it is it is so dumb it is so bad i do not get how people are paid for this but but they are. And that's where it becomes a real issue because even though they are not actually talking to Gen Z in that way, they have a lot of money. I mean, they raised like $30 million in 2020, and they're using that money to actually try and target Gen Z. I mean, I go to Cal State Long Beach. We are an insanely pro-democracy school.

And in 2020, during the California governor's recall, they were tabling and they had flyers. And from like a strategic perspective, they were not going to net more than 10 votes out of that entire school, but they were still wasting a few thousand dollars there. And when you think about that, if they're doing that across the country, that's a very big issue because there is not a single youth group on the pro-democracy side that has the funding to really

rival that. So the way that we have been kind of counteracting that has been through being, this is going to sound real, by the the way i do not have be real just but the way that we have been counteracting that has been by being real by being honest about who we are by being a true people rather than this caricatures of what the far right thinks young people like, because we are not having fireworks. We are not having WWE spectacles. We're having true conversations about things that people care about. And I think we hosted a youth political summit in August, and I think that's a great example of it, because even though we did not have fireworks and grand entrances with smoke, we had real conversations and we talked with people who are actually reaching young voters.

We had over 150 young attendees who are organizing across the country in order to strategize how we're going to turn out the vote. And we are having all of these conversations across about the things that young people actually feel in their lives. We're talking about book bans. We're talking abortion. We're talking about student debt. We're talking about gun violence. These are really very tangible issues in our lives that are what truly motivates Gen Z. So they might have $30 million, but we have the energy of an entire generation behind us. We have truth and facts on our side. And we also have amazing allies who maybe do have the money, who have been helping amplify our efforts across the country to make sure that they don't go anywhere because they don't represent our generation. They don't represent our generation's

values and they damn well do not represent who we want our generation to be. You do have all these mega donors, billions and billions and billions of dollars being put towards these Turning Points USA events, all of these right wing astroturf events that you see. That ain't cheap. It's not cheap to run those events with the fireworks. Our summit was not cheap and we did not have fireworks nor smoke. Yeah, these events cost a lot of money and they have deep pockets funding that because they see the importance of these events. And it's always like pulling teeth to explain to donors on our side why it's important that we are speaking to young voters, why we are having events. We don't need them to be WWE style events with fireworks and stuff, but we could have our

own version of events where we're constantly reaching out to people. But it seems like these donors just don't see the merit of it. Is it just that big dollar donors at the end of the day, they want lower taxes. They want, you know, and they don't care what it takes to get like, what is going on? Where's the disconnect? I do not understand it. I mean, I've had several conversations with like big dollar donors who at the end of the day are like, I want to give you money, but I need to put my money in the more strategic place. And because young voters simply don't vote, it's not worth it.

You're not a worthy investment. So I've kind of just settled on the fact that we've reached the highest ever youth turnout in 2020 with a grand total of $0.00 in in budget we are gonna match that in 2022 with a very limited budget and i hope that that will prove to those big dollar donors that we know what the fuck we're doing and that if they give us money we will turn out gen c because until they do that the sort of threat on the far right continues to grow because at this point it's not only gen it's not only turning point you have a gen c gop i think which is something it exists it's weird they're fascist they're insane you have all these crazy groups that are producing like media you have like ben shapiro and kandon sowens and whatever the fuck they're doing

all these people who are in large part talking to young people and they are all very well funded and until we are able to match that funding we're just kind of handing off a lot of ground to them because they are able to pay for advertisements they're able to reach so many more people than we are organically and we have to make tough choices are we advertising some of the content that people on our side are producing or are we directing geo tv ads ads? Are we playing in a new district or are we trying to fight back against this information? Are we producing more educational content or are we trying to fund another summit?

Like at that point, we have to start making tough calls that I really wish we didn't have to make, but we simply don't have the money for all of it. So yeah, I mean, big dollar donors, where the fuck are you? Please give me money. I need it. Step up everybody. Let's go. Well, it's, it's, it's the real chicken or the egg situation, right? Where it's like, well, we don't want to give to you because young voters historically haven't shown up in the numbers that

we need. Um, but you're like, yeah, because you're not writing to us to in order to make that turnout and inspire that turnout. Like like if you if you actually put the resources in and the attention into young voters, then perhaps you'd start seeing the results. But you are defying the odds anyway, which I think is so great, even on the limited budget. And and you're turning people you're turning people out. I want to I'm going to turn it over to Jordi, but I did want to ask you about a situation that happened a few weeks ago with one of the activists from your organization who was actually kicked by Marjorie Taylor Greene. I mean, we saw this video now go super viral. There have been a few different angles of it.

And honestly, some of the earlier angles, it wasn't 100% clear what had happened. And then we saw the other angle where it was very clear that Marjorie Taylor Greene wound up and kicked this woman twice. Describe the experience, because I know you were literally right alongside her. What happened there? Is Voters of Tomorrow taking any action against Marjorie Taylor Greene? What's the deal? Yeah. So I'm sorry. I still it's just so ridiculous. I still cannot even think about it without laughing. So we were in Washington, D.C. to advocate for the Gen Z agenda. The Gen Z agenda is a compilation of policy proposals that Gen Z broadly believes in. And we had been meeting with Republicans and Democrats all week. We had been having some really good conversations, even with people who disagreed with the policies. I mean, we met with Joe Manchin's office. We all have different opinions than Joe Manchin. Like, even though he didn't obviously support all of the things that we were pushing for, like we had a good with a roundtable, I'm sorry, with the Democrats in the House Rules Committee. And as we were leaving that roundtable, we saw that the House Freedom Caucus was having a press conference outside the Capitol. We have been unable to meet with any of

them. And we decided that since we were going to be unable to have like formal meetings, we could at least ask them some questions. So we respectfully waited until the end of their press conference. And throughout all of that, they had been like side eyeing us. And I mean, we are a, I'm going to say very diverse group on several fronts. So like we, we do not look like the sort of people who would be fans of the Freedom Caucus. And like, I think they caught that on pretty quickly, because again, they had been side eyeing us the entire time. So after we kind of figured that if we just approach, they would not speak to us. So we kind of had to figure out a better strategy. And I after the press conference, I just went ahead and asked Marjorie Tillich Green for a selfie saying that I was a better strategy. And I, after the press conference, I just went ahead and asked

Marjorie Tillich Green for a selfie saying that I was a huge fan. As I was taking the selfie, I turned around and asked her why she kept letting kids get shot in schools. And that kind of set up a chain of events that culminated in the kick. Lauren Boebert tried to knock my phone off my hand and then walked away. We kept walking with Marjorie Taylor Greene and Andrew Clyde, who no one paid attention to this in the video, but I think my favorite part of it

is Andrew Clyde is telling me that I can't speak like that to elected members of Congress. And if you do not know who Andrew Clyde is, he's the guy that says the insurrection was a normal tourist visit. And the guy who was photographed in utter panic during the insurrection by the door, as if he thought his life was about to end, who then later on said, oh, it was just a tourist visit. Yeah. You were with the wackiest of the wackies when you were walking around that day.

And my favorite part of that entire video is because I hadn't recognized him at that point. So he starts telling me that I can't speak to members of Congress that way. And I'm just like, oh my God, you're the tourist guy. And he kept trying to talk about it. And he, I'm sorry, that's just my, no one paid attention to it, but I laughed so hard when I saw it. But yeah, so walked with them.

We went into, if you know the Capitol, we were working, we were walking from the house side towards the Cannon building into the parking lot. And if you, if you know, you know that the sidewalk kind of shrinks because you're crossing the street and then there's a parking lot. So Mariana had to get over the, in front of Marjorie Taylor Greene, just because if not, she would run into a tree. And she did that. And then Marjorie Taylor Greene, like, I, I don't know how else to say it. So after that, she told me I should go back to my country uh when we called her out on twitter she came for me on twitter uh i ratioed her which i'm very proud of and good job good job yeah and yeah so i something that wasn't recorded in the video that i think is really funny is

after we like let her go she kept screaming to herself for probably a good 30 seconds because she did not realize we're no longer with her. So you just see like this crazy woman screaming to the heavens for like a good 30 seconds by herself. Oh my gosh. So yeah, we, after all of that happened,

we met with our legal team. We sort of discussed several options that we had and we realized that we had to do something to hold her accountable and that the best option was to file a complaint with the Congressional with the Office of Congressional Ethics. So that's the route that we've decided to take. We are currently in the process of finalizing the complaint and are expecting it to file soon. For the people on Twitter who are asking, why are you doing this instead of turning out to vote? I am not doing this. I do not know how to do this.

This is why we have a legal team, because a legal team can't handle this. So we are in the process of finalizing that complaint. And we are hoping that the office will find the claim valid, that they will send it to the ethics committee and that the ethics committee will take action to hold her accountable. There you go. And that kind of leads me to what was going to be my question, which I guess I don't have to ask anymore is, you know, what has been like the most bizarre thing to happen to you. But I mean, I don't think anything could top a member of Congress kicking a member of your staff, assaulting a member of your staff.

So I'm going to reframe this one a little bit differently. Santiago, what I appreciate about you, man, the most is you don't just talk the talk. You walk the walk. You're out there. You're traveling. You're a college student. You're juggling like a million different things because you care about this country, because you are unapologetically pro-democracy. So instead of the most bizarre moment, what's been the most

rewarding moment of this process for you? I think it has to be going to the White House. I mean, I have been doing this work for a few months now, a few years now. Fuck, I don't even know what time it is today anymore. It really does fly. Yeah, I've been doing this work for a while now, and I think

the biggest thing was since Biden came into office, I have been lucky enough to receive several invites to the White House, and for one reason or office, I have been lucky enough to receive like several invites to the White House. And for one reason or another, I had been unable to actually go until a few weeks ago with the IRA celebration. So whether it was because, I mean, the first one, I just had to take the midterm that I couldn't miss. And like that one was sort of just horrible because i i wanted to go and i couldn't the second one was more of a choice but like my grandmother was turning 80 and we had

promised like we would all be there for her birthday and like i i had to choose whether to like break that promise or like fly to washington so i decided to stay. Good to see you. It was great. And then I finally got to go with the IRA celebration and that was amazing. And then I got to go back a few...

two weeks ago for Hispanic Heritage Month. So honestly, just having that work be recognized has been great. Having the opportunity to like go to the white house has been amazing. And just like talking to all the people who are like actually making the country run or who are like on the front line defending democracy. Like I was talking to a few people at DOJ. I was talking to a few people on staff and like, that's just And that's just amazing and

one of my most enjoyable experiences. I love it. That is so cool, man. And I want to shift the conversation quickly, just briefly back to messaging because, and I'm kind of leading the witness for our listeners here. I've noticed a few tweets of Santiago. He's a little bit frustrated on how certain political campaigns out there, we don't have to dive into the specifics, but our messaging to Gen Z voters and while other organizations are messaging to Gen Z voters. So what's your take on sort of how you sort of cut through the clutter and make sure that your message for this very diverse, not just in people with diverse in thought and diverse

in where they are in terms of social platforms and, you know, in society. How do you get your message across and make sure that you are, you know, impacting and resonating with Gen Z? There's like two sides of it. The first one is like, please, if you're listening and you do political messaging, please let young people be the messengers for young people. I am absolutely tired of people in their 50s, 60s, and 70s coming in and trying to butt into students' spaces, trying to take the conversation away from us. I'm sorry, you do not speak like a young person. And

that's just the way things are. Gen C messaging should be led by gen c and one of my biggest frustrations with all of this is that you have so many groups who just didn't know when to sort of transition their audience either because the staff decided to stay too long or because they are simply trying to talk to an audience that is not responding to them anymore. And they, they keep thinking that they're speaking the language when they're really not. And listen, that's fine. I don't speak Gen Z language.

That's why I don't do our messaging. That's what we have. High schoolers doing messaging. Like I can't do a tick tock. Like I said, I'm not going to be real. It's it's fine. But I think it's important to recognize that and let people who know how to

talk about it, do it. Because if not, you have all these groups taking so much space and so many resources and thinking that they are the group trying to own the conversation when their messaging is simply not effective. The second part is, I think during the past like 40 minutes, we've talked a lot about what Gen Z cares about and all these issues and personal freedom and how that's affecting our lives. And all those issues are very unifying to Gen Z. So even though you have this diversity in thought, all those issues kind of bring us all together. So by focusing on those things, that's how we hold like the pro-democracy coalition together, because we might disagree on specifics of tax policy.

We might disagree on specifics in education, but the rights to be who we are are something that kind of unite all of us. And when we talk about it and we meet young voters where they are, when you have young people calling other young people and phone bangs, when you have young people doing the text bangs, when you have college students knocking on the doors of other college students, and when you have young people actually writing the messaging that we're using on ads, and that we're using on social media, that makes a difference because we're communicating about things that young people care about and are communicating in ways that young people understand.

And that takes this conversation pretty much full circle at this point. It's the authenticity of your organization, of your organization, of Voters of Tomorrow, which I think resonates so well with your audience. I mean, it's for Gen Z, by Gen Z, and it's just been so impressive to see you run the ship on this with your team. It's been amazing, man, for real. So like we said, we're 27 days out at the time of this recording for the interview. When this releases, we'll be even less days from the midterm elections. What is Voters of Tomorrow doing right now to bridge the gap in these last, we'll call it 20 days? Yeah, listen, we are currently running a massive JOTV operation in the first few weeks. In the first three weeks of it, we sent over a million text messages. We're trying to not only double

that, but triple it, quadruple it, quintuple it. I don't know if that's the word. We're doing that. We're working with our endorsed candidates to make sure that they too are messaging the right way. We're preparing to start knocking doors on campuses and college towns to make sure that people are registered to vote. We're running influencer campaigns. We're running targeted ads. We're doing everything we can in social media, and we're partnering with influencers and celebrities, hopefully, in order to make sure that we're reaching people in ways that are both authentic to them and that they care about. We have been working with different student groups, both. I know you guys do a lot of work with Students for Shapiro.

We love Students for Shapiro. We have been working with them to make sure we elect Joe Shapiro as governor of Pennsylvania. We are sending buses. We have in coordination with Students for beto we're currently sending buses to texas a&m to make sure greg abbott decided to take early voting places away from campus so we're sending buses to make sure that students are able to easily and quickly get to their polling place we're doing stuff like that across the country we have a lot of fun kind of gimmicky things planned in order to raise awareness of everything going on so i i think i i'm not sure i'm ready to announce those but maybe when the next like

two or three days so keep your eyes peeled for that uh that's very exciting so you are frankly everywhere doing you're all in voters of tomorrow is all in in these last 20 something days and just love to see it and love to hear all in these last 20 something days and just love to see it and love to hear all the amazing work. And this interview has just been so incredible. And I know our audience listening to this is going to want to know how they can help because, you know, unfortunately, those big dollar donors don't exist at the moment. So where can our listeners support voters of tomorrow, whether it be monetary or via social media and help out with text banking or phone banking and all the great stuff that you're doing, where can they support

you guys? Yeah, listen, just go to votersoftomorrow.org. We have, it's a one-stop shop for everything you'd voting for. You can donate, you can volunteer, you can check your registration status, you can register to vote, you can request an absentee ballot. If you're a young person, you can start, you can start a Voters of Tomorrow chapter and get involved on campus. Everything that you might want is on that website.

So go check it out and please help us. We have 27 days to go. We said we're going to turn out Gen Z and we're very committed to doing it. Well, please, everybody, check it out. Votersoftomorrow.org. Let's make it happen. There is no time to waste. Santiago, I just want to thank you so much for coming on this episode of the Midas Touch podcast. Thank you for having me. Like I said, very Mighty. Remember to check out votersoftomorrow.org. See how you could get involved today. Make sure to support this incredible organization who's doing just such incredible and impactful work on the ground with just a few weeks till midterms. We

really need all hands on deck right now. As a reminder, you could also support our independent media network here at Midas Touch and get exclusive bonus content on our Patreon. That's patreon.com slash Midas Touch. So sign up today to support independent media. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Mighty. And Jordy, want to take us out? Absolutely. Shout out to the Midas Mighty!