The MeidasTouch Podcast - NextGen America President Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez on the POWER of Young Voters

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Starting point is 00:00:50 free of charge bet mgm operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming ontario hi this is brett mycellus co-founder of Midas touch and you are listening to the mighty on the mighty we've been highlighting candidates and activists that you need to know about as we head into the most important midterm elections of our lives. Today, we speak to Cristina Cinson Ramirez, the president of NextGen America. NextGen America is the nation's largest youth voting organization that's using innovative digital and field strategies to turn out young voters in key states. They're empowering the largest and most diverse generation in history

Starting point is 00:01:30 through voter education, registration, and mobilization. It was such a pleasure to chat with Christina who gave us her thoughts on youth enthusiasm as we approach the midterms and gave us so much insight as to what we need to know about what's happening on the ground in communities to get voters to the polls. If you want to watch the video version of this interview and get access to even more bonus content you won't find anywhere else, be sure to join us on Patreon right now at patreon.com slash MidasTouch. That's P-A-T-R-E-O-N dot com slash MidasTouch. It's also just a great way for you to support our truly independent media network that is fueled by you, the people, not by billionaires, corporations, or any outside investors. Without further ado, our interview with Christina Cinson Ramirez.

Starting point is 00:02:20 Welcome to this edition of The Mighty. This is Ben Micellus joined by my brothers, Brett and Jordy Micellus. As you know, we have been highlighting the critical issues that are on the minds of Americans heading into these midterms, which are very, very, very rapidly approaching. And I say very a lot of times on purpose here. And so I'm really privileged to have as a guest on our podcast today, Christina Cinson Ramirez, who is the president of NextGen America, the nation's largest youth voting rights organization. NextGen has registered and mobilized millions of young people to the polls with the goal of harnessing the power of young people to reshape the political outcome of our country, not just for an election cycle, but a generation. Christina, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. Now, I think about the harnessing the power of the youth and a story recently with Ben Sasse, senator of Nebraska, who, through this very secretive selection process very anti LGBTQ plus and wants to now represent a university that has a diverse community.

Starting point is 00:03:56 And the people within the university community themselves, the students are saying we're not taking that. So it's just an interesting time period where you have that politics in D.C. versus what's going on the ground there in Florida. We see this across the country, Christina. What do you want to could you speak to that event as well? And just I think what's going on in campuses across the country. Yeah. So, you know, young people today, which we count as ages 18 to 35, are the most diverse and largest generational voting bloc in American history. They also happen to be the most progressive. So generational voting bloc in American history. They also happen to be the most progressive. So we've really seen since 2004, Republicans losing a larger and larger share of young voters. And also as young people, I'm a grandma millennial.

Starting point is 00:04:35 As we get older, we're also staying very progressive. And because this is such a diverse generation, they look at the Republican Party, they look at MAGA Republicans, ultra conservatives, and they say, you don't represent us. You don't represent us on LGBTQ issues, on racial justice issues, and not on economic justice issues. And now, of course, everyone sees not on women's rights issues as well. And so, you know, an entire generation of young people were poised by the Republican Party. And of course, you see that playing out on campuses, communities, and elections across the country. And you have, though, MAGA extremism and their proxy groups like Turning Point USA and PragerU and these other groups, though, that are they're more of these kind of propaganda styled events, more astroturfing than real organic

Starting point is 00:05:27 events, but spending a lot of time though, focusing on trying to, you know, I think brainwash and manipulate with fireworks and all of these ridiculous things, though the youth, I mean, are you seeing that increasingly that they realize that exactly the thesis that you just said, which they're saying you don't represent us. So they're trying to really target the youth right now. Yeah. So you actually we just had this happen. I live in Texas, which we're actually the third youngest state in the country and one of the most diverse. So one in three eligible voters is under the age of 30. Beto O'Rourke took 71 percent of the youth vote when he ran against Ted Cruz. So Republicans know that

Starting point is 00:06:06 they've got to do something about the youth vote. So Dan Crenshaw, Congressman, and Greg Abbott, our governor, just did a youth vote summit for young people. It was like an all-white male audience of just a couple hundred people. It looks nothing what Texas actually looks like, but it's just like a last-d ditch effort, a sad attempt, instead of adjusting their policies, spent pumping millions and millions of dollars to try and get the few young Republicans out to vote because they know that young people are overwhelmingly progressive. And then they also pass policies in some of the fastest racially demographically changing states. So Texas, Arizona, Georgia, where the older population

Starting point is 00:06:46 looks very different than the younger population. You see a host of voter suppression bills. And in my home state, for example, vote by mail is only allowed for people over age 65. So automatically excludes younger people. And so young people are the one group consistently that legislators will try and block from voting and exercising their full power, whether they say it's because they're students or in other ways by removing polling locations from campuses. You see a host of ways that Republicans state by state are really trying to diminish the power of young people because they have overwhelmingly lost them. And instead of changing their policies to address their pain, they're trying to exclude them from voting. One of the things you mentioned there, too, though, is that Republicans recognizing the problem that they have with not getting youth voters to support them as they try to exclude

Starting point is 00:07:39 people from the process, though, is they still are investing millions and millions of dollars, and their billionaire donors are freely writing these checks to fund these absurd WWE-style events. I mean, from someone who has somewhat of a background in event planning, I watched some of those Turning Point events. I go, that event must be like $3 million to put on with all of those things. And they get those checks freely. On the other hand, where there's a great deal of actual grassroots energy on the side of progressive movement, it seems that the hardest part

Starting point is 00:08:18 is actually getting the funding to do some of the most basic things, like just to get people on buses to go to point A to point B, not fireworks. We're not asking for fireworks. We're just asking for basic travel and transportation. So what is your observation, though, about that disparity of these right-wing billionaires writing those checks freely? And I just feel on the progressive side, sometimes it's very difficult to get those checks. Yeah, I think that there has been an underinvestment of young people by Democrats and progressives,

Starting point is 00:08:49 and particularly young people of color have been just abysmal investment. And, you know, I come from the Latino community where we've seen portions of our community start to vote Republican in my home state of Texas and places like Florida. And that's just because Republicans put money and time into our community. And Democrats, a lot of them have taken our votes for granted. And I believe that ultimately Democrats have better policies to address the pain and needs of America's younger generations and young people of color in particular, whether you're talking about raising the minimum wage, legalizing marijuana, protecting the sanctity of gay marriage, or making sure that women can decide what happened with their own bodies. Those are policies that overwhelmingly young people are in line with Democrats on.

Starting point is 00:09:36 But there needs to be a lot more money put into young people. Candidates face a problem, which is, you know, they're going to look at an election and they're going to look at how they expand, how they win with the electorate that exists. And, you know, if you look at what happened in Georgia, it was 10 years of investment in communities of color and young people to build the electorate that was necessary to actually transform the state. And it's those kinds of multi-year investments that aren't sexy for a lot of Democratic donors, but are how you shift power. And I see, honestly, a lot of Republicans, if you look at the Koch brothers, they funded

Starting point is 00:10:13 for years and still fund the Libra initiative, which is based here in Texas, focused on winning the Latino vote through community services and doing long-term build and turning point, we can laugh at them, but we should also take the threat seriously that they are willing to invest in communities. And if Democrats don't want to lose portions of the youth vote or votes in communities of color, they need to put their money where their mouth is. Yeah, we always say that too. We could definitely laugh at them all we want, but they are there doing the work. And in your opinion, are Democrats doing enough work on the ground to help reach Latino communities? Or are they just being taken for granted? I think that we have to do a lot more to

Starting point is 00:10:56 invest in our community. We are the youngest ethnic group, right? So the most common age for a white American is age 55. For an African American, it's 27. For Latino in the United States, it's 11. So, so much of our voting power really lies in the under 30 population, which is just overwhelmingly progressive. I think, you know, you can look at two examples that happened in 2020. You can look at Bernie Sanders, who put millions and millions of dollars into reaching young Latino voters and Latino voters overall.

Starting point is 00:11:26 And he won it hands down, especially in South Texas, where then you saw big swaths go Republican in the general election. There were a lot of those people that voted for Bernie and then went and voted for Trump. And that's because economic populism message works and spending time and money talking to the community. We cannot depend on people to turn out if we don't actually spend the time and money speaking to their pain and power. It's just that simple. One of the things that I've noticed over the past few months is this incredible energy that we've seen from young voters around the country. Ben had mentioned Ben Sasse and the reaction that he got out in Florida. But we've been seeing this in a variety of cases.

Starting point is 00:12:10 We saw this in Florida with Ron DeSantis after he signed the Don't Say Gay bill. We saw this when Glenn Youngkin implemented his anti-transgender policy in schools. How do we translate that energy, though, into actual votes, into people actually coming out and doing their civic duty and making it actually happen? You know, I think for a lot of younger folks, too, it's important to run. There's two things we have to do. One is we have to talk about what we're up against and then the power we have to change it. So for a lot of younger people that are just starting out in the electoral process, they need to understand that the Democratic Party, I think young voters have already started to really win in the Democratic Party. We just had the Biden administration cancel student debt, pass the largest investment

Starting point is 00:12:54 to address the climate crisis by any country in the entire world, and historic gun safety legislation. That was all won because young people pushed the Democratic Party to be more true and also reform tax policy to start to make it a system that's more fair and taxes the rich their fair share. If you go back to the Democratic Party of the 90s, they were not talking about a lot of this stuff and they weren't putting it at the forefront of the agenda. So one is to remind people what they're already winning. And then the consequences, I think the reversal of Roe, you saw immediately hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets, especially young people, a lot of young women take to the streets. And what we're seeing across the country is that being channeled into historic voter registration. In many states, you know, usually where voter

Starting point is 00:13:42 registration is on par between men and women, we're seeing 10 point differences of women registering and huge portions of them being Democratic, a huge number of them being young women under the age of 30. So I think that young people are already translating that energy into the electoral process. If we look at what happened in Kansas, just the the what we saw happen in Kansas was because the Democratic base, which is young people and people of color, turned out in record numbers in a race that normally none of them would turn out for because they realized that really fascism is on the ballot again this election. Now, are you seeing those same trends among young voters and voter registration in Texas as well? Yeah, we saw a huge surge in young people registering post-OBs and nearly, you know, this is, of course, data that's been released by Target Smart. They saw, I think the number was 300,000 people, young people register in the post-OBs decision. Mind you, Beto lost in 2018 by only a little over 220,000 votes. So, you know, every year in Texas, 411,000 people turn 18, and the majority of them are

Starting point is 00:14:57 young people of color. And they look at around and see what the states make up of this and the policies they're pushing. And it looks very different than the future that they want to be a part of. I do want to say that changing a state of 30 million people, that's the largest battleground state in the country, doesn't happen overnight. And that Republicans are totally terrified of losing Texas. And if anybody wants to change Texas, it's all going to come down to young people. And that's why we need to have a long-term vision of how to shift change. That's where I think the right does better than we do.

Starting point is 00:15:30 The right thinks long-term. And we think election cycle to election cycle. When they've got 40-year plans, at best, we have four-month plans. Yeah, I'm happy you said that because I feel like in a lot of conversations that I'll have with strategists or just seeing pundits speak on TV and whatnot, you often hear people say, why are you even investing in Texas? Why? Like, we're not going to win Texas this time. We're not going to win. And they've been saying it year after year after year after year. But that negates the whole fact that what about the next election cycle? What about the next? So you just want to abandon a state entirely. What do you think about people

Starting point is 00:16:00 who kind of have this defeatist attitude and say, you know what, it's not even worth our time? Well, I think especially Georgia hopefully taught a lot of Democrats a lot of lessons, right? That was not a sheer cycle electoral strategy. Again, that was like a decade-long project in community organizing and voter registration. Hard, not sexy work, very, very hard work to do over a decade. And investing in grassroots organizing and voter registration got us an African-American pastor to be the senator from Georgia. It got us a young Jewish-American man to be the senator from Georgia. And I hope and believe it will give us the first black female governor in the United States. And having those two senators, again, historic climate legislation, gun safety legislation, all of the things that have

Starting point is 00:16:54 gotten done would not have been possible had that investment not been made. And too many times, you know, I think we also have to look at who controls strategy and who controls money. There is a lack of belief in communities of color. And I think we also have to look at who controls strategy and who controls money. There is a lack of belief in communities of color. And I think we have to challenge where that comes from and demand that people invest, not just in the idea that demographics are destiny, but I think that's actually where we make a lot of mistakes. Demographics are simply a core ingredient in the recipe for change. They are not change itself.

Starting point is 00:17:24 And I think our side needs to understand that a lot more. What do you think is the biggest misconception that pundits and political experts have about the younger generations and youth turnout? apathetic, which is hilarious because all of the data shows otherwise. This is actually, so we have had in 2018 and 2020, the largest youth voter turnout in American history. And also the data is very clear that this is a very civically minded generation. In fact, outpacing what we think of in the 1960s as like a high watermark of youth participation in civics or social justice work. I believe it circles numbers that close to one in four young people participated in marches during COVID-19 for the Black Lives Matter movement. You see a huge number of young people pushing on climate, gun safety, immigration, that all of the major progressive

Starting point is 00:18:26 wins, if you look at them over the last several years, have really been pushed by young people. So the data is very clear that young people are very engaged and very politically aware. They are simply not, they are voting overwhelmingly for Democrats, but they are voting for progressive policy, and more of them see themselves as independents than other generations, even though they overwhelmingly vote for Democrats. And Christina, one of the things, one of the themes that we've been hitting on in this interview is this younger generation is really the most diverse generation to ever exist, not just in people, but in thought. So with that, you know, is there one issue in particular that you feel that this younger

Starting point is 00:19:05 generation is really leaning on heading into this election? Or is it a variety of issues like climate change and legalization of marijuana, abortion, student debt, sort of a culmination of all these things? I mean, I think young people are very intersectional in their approach about issues, right? You're going to have some top issues. Climate change is always going to be in the top three. Economic justice is always going to be in the top three. Economic justice is always going to be in the top three. And then what has surged to the top, which is unique in this election, is, of course, abortion.

Starting point is 00:19:33 So we just finished some polling. We had done some polling pre the reversal of Roe. And then we did some in the end of August. And we were already seeing trends of people being concerned about abortion, but then it shot to the top. So now two and three young voters that we polled said they feel like abortion is on the ballot this election and it's motivating them to vote. The numbers show that 76% of young eligible voters are opposed to the reversal of Roe. And if you look at, if you take out women out of that, it's 82%. 82% were opposed to the reversal of Roe. So it is motivating a lot of people that might sit out in the midterm, not because they don't care, but they weren't paying

Starting point is 00:20:17 attention. They didn't even know there was a midterm. And I know for all of us that are like political junkies, it's hard to imagine that someone wouldn't know there's a midterm, but a lot of people don't. And now they know there is a midterm. And Lindsey Graham made it very clear to people that the overturning of Roe, whether you're in a blue state or a red state, that they are coming for an entire abortion ban across the country. And so I think people are motivated no matter the state they're in because of this issue. And this generation too, they're difficult. I think some people feel intimidated to reach out to them because they don't know how to get their message clearly articulated towards this generation because they're on all these different platforms and they're very unique in that way. What have you found to be the most effective way to communicate just this pro-democracy message

Starting point is 00:21:03 to this next generation? So at NextGen, we try and organize anywhere and everywhere young people are to turn them out. We focus on battleground states. So we have a field team on 186 community and college campuses in eight states, as I mentioned. And we also are organizing, they get mail from us. We're organizing online. We organize influencers on Instagram, TikTok to reach millions of young people. And we also organize on dating apps was something that really surged to the forefront of our organizing strategies in COVID because there was a 90% increase in people organizing on dating app or being on dating apps. And you can search by geography. You can look up people's political persuasion. And so we have 25,000 volunteers across the country that are helping us reach people on

Starting point is 00:21:56 dating apps and making sure they have a voting plan. We're not trying to catfish anyone. We're just talking about the big democracy and getting young people to make sure that they're ready for the election. That's amazing. And that basically answers my next question. We're less than 30 days out at this point from the midterms. You know, what's next gen doing in this last 25 days, 26 days? We are, like I said, we are doing all of those things. And then we're going to be doing a tour across our states on college campuses. We'll be unveiling a special guest that is very popular with young people that will be going with us to college campuses. And then we've just been doing the hard grind work since early spring of getting young people registered,

Starting point is 00:22:41 pledged to vote. And like I said, we, anyway, if there's of the young people that we're targeting, they will see us on social media. They will see us on their campuses. They will see us in their community. They will see us on their dating apps. We will try and be anywhere and everywhere they are to let them know about the power they have this election to determine the outcome. That is amazing. And so we have a really passionate audience that always loves to help where they can. How can people help next gen? Where can they get involved? What should they do? Yeah. So we are building out our army. I forgot to mention, we also send tens of millions of texts and phone calls to people. Phone calls actually do

Starting point is 00:23:19 work for young people. You'd be surprised. So we are building our army. I said we have 25,000 volunteers across the country. We're trying to grow that in the last few weeks. We just had 3,000 people join last week. We'd like to get up to like 35,000 folks by election time to help us make those calls and texts or organize on dating apps. And they can go to nextgenamerica.org forward slash volunteer. Again, that's nextgenamerica.org forward slash volunteer, and they can volunteer from wherever they are to help us turn out young people. Christina Cinson Ramirez, so great having you on the Midas Touch podcast, the edition of The Mighty.

Starting point is 00:24:01 Thanks so much, y'all. Thank you, Christina, and thank you for listening to this episode of The Mighty. Thanks so much, y'all. Thank you, Christina. And thank you for listening to this episode of The Mighty. Remember to look for volunteer opportunities with NextGen America at nextgenamerica.org slash volunteer. Also consider supporting our independent media network right now at patreon.com slash MidasTouch. That's P-A-T-R-E-O-N dot com slash MidasTouch. In addition to helping this network grow, you get access to great bonus content, including the video version of this podcast. As always, you can find great MidasTouch gear at store.MidasTouch.com, so make sure to get your November gear before election day. Thank you for listening, and shout out to the Midas Mighty.

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The MeidasTouch Podcast - NextGen America President Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez on the POWER of Young Voters

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