Harris enthusiasm driving a surge in young Latino registration: Voto Latino

Voter registration among young Hispanics jumped over the past two months, a change that the president and CEO of Voto Latino says is mostly driven by voter enthusiasm for Vice President Harris.

María Teresa Kumar told The Hill that Harris is tapping into a cultural phenomenon with the under-40 crowd.

“For older voters and for donors coming in, it’s like, ‘We could actually beat Trump.’ I think for young people, it’s a genuine, authentic enthusiasm. And I say this because … the moment she announced, we saw young voters tick up,” Kumar said.

“It was nuts. So we were registering roughly 60 to 100 voters a day on Friday. On Monday, it jumped to 3,000. By [the next] Friday, it was 8,000. It was super exciting. Night and day. It’s a very cool chart.”

According to numbers from Voto Latino, which targets young Latinos for registration, the group facilitated 36,000 registrations in the six months leading up to July 21. In the weeks since, Voto Latino has registered 120,000 additional voters.

Of those voters, 59 percent are under 30, and 29 percent are in their 30s.

Those age groups, Kumar said, are connecting to Harris’s message not only on new platforms, but through language that’s lost on older demographics.

“I do think that we’re not giving the phenomena that is happening on TikTok enough credit. The moment that that young woman said, ‘Kamala is brat,’ it distinguished the right and the misogyny of how they were trying to place her. They were trying to place her as ‘she laughs too much, she’s not organized, she’s not focused,’ you know? And basically, Gen Z is like, ‘she’s messy, we’re messy. But we’re also smart, so don’t get confused,’” said Kumar, referring to pop star Charli XCX’s labeling of Harris as “brat.”

But traditional Democratic strategists haven’t fully caught up, according to Kumar.

“I’ve been in these kitchen cabinet meetings with all these consultants trying to figure out how they were going to go against the misogyny of that ‘They don’t like her voice.’ … You know, people earning hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it literally took one tweet from one Gen Zer to encapsulate and emasculate the other side. I mean, brilliant, right?”

For Voto Latino, the enthusiasm is helping its registration dollars have a bigger impact.

The overall cost of each new registration when President Biden was the presumptive Democratic nominee hovered around $25, according to Kumar, and the initial surge of Harris enthusiasm brought that cost down to $14, though it has since settled at around $18.

Despite the success in registrations, Kumar said she is concerned officials in GOP-led states could set barriers for new voters.

“My concern, though, is that if the moment states allow early voting, if we’re not standing in line from the very beginning and flooding ballots, they’re going to use everything to cheat. This has to be a no questions election. This has to be,” she said.

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