0:00:00.9 Dom Adams-Santos: Alright. Hi everyone. Hi. Hi. Happy Tuesday. I am Dom Adams-Santos from the Center for Racial Justice here at the Ford School. And when we were thinking about programming for this fall, we knew that we wanted to do our part in educating our community about the complexities of voting, public opinion, and the policy issues that matter most to the wider public, including a focus on Latinx voting and voters. As we know, the Latinx community in the United States is heterogeneous and omnipresent, representing every corner of the country and many political priorities. According to the Pew Research Center from 2016 to 2024, the number of Latinos eligible to vote grew from 27 million to a projected 36 million. And while Latino voters have favored democratic candidates in presidential elections for many decades, the margin of support has varied. With only 20 days until election day. If you can believe it this conversation is very timely.

0:01:07.8 DA: And now it's my pleasure to introduce our special guest, Chuck Rocha, who is joining us for today's conversation. Chuck Rocha began his political career in the woods of East Texas at United Rubber Workers local 746. By 22, he had become the youngest officer of the 1200 person local. At 29 he was hired to be the youngest first person of color and last rank and file National political director of the United Steel Workers of America. He is credited with building out one of the top national labor political departments in the country. In 2010, Chuck left the USW to create Solidarity Strategies. The firm was built on the idea of diversity, inclusion and mentorship opportunities for the next generation of minority professionals. And in 10 years, Solidarity has employed over 100 young people of color and has become one of the most successful minority owned political consulting firms in the nation.

0:02:12.2 DA: Chuck has worked on several presidential, congressional and gubernatorial races through the years, including both of Senator Bernie's Sanders presidential campaigns. He is the first Latino to run a presidential campaign and accomplished all of this despite never attending college, having a criminal record and being a single father at 20 years old. We had the opportunity over lunch to get some words of wisdom and advice from Chuck and who is very generous with his time and with our students. And he's going to be joined in conversation by our very own Dr. Mara Cecilia Ostfeld. And Mara is the research director at the Center for Racial Justice and an associate research professor in the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. In addition, Mara is a faculty lead at the Detroit Metro Area Community Study and ongoing representative survey of Detroit households that asks residents about their expectations, perceptions, priorities, and aspirations. She is an expert in survey research and the analysis of public opinion with a particular focus on the relationship between race, gender, media, and political attitude. So of course this is gonna be a fantastic conversation. It's also being live streamed to folks who can't be with us in person. And I believe Mara's gonna kick us off with some useful context as we dive into this conversation.

[applause]

0:03:53.5 Dr. Mara Cecilia Ostfeld: Everyone, for me here today especially on fall break, I know many of you were away or weren't necessarily planning to join us on campus today, so we appreciate you all being here. If you are an election nerd like me there's little else that you wanna do besides hear from someone that's knowledgeable as Chuck who can not only talk about kind of the macro picture of campaign strategy, but also get into the weeds of what's happening in this district and the approach of this district and the unique nuances of communities throughout the US. So thank you Chuck, for being here with us again today. I know we're all approaching this conversation and this election from different positions. So I just wanted to start off with a little bit of level setting and just provide a really brief, concise overview of the Latino electorate today.

0:04:37.1 DO: First off, before you ever talk about Latino voters, I think you always need to start off by just highlighting the diversity of Latinos that we have Latinos from a broad range of ethnic backgrounds, different ages, different immigration statuses, different religions living in every part of this country. And so you can imagine that while we are talking about broad trends among the Latino electorate and the Latino community, there's just enormous diversity. So nothing that is being said, we'll speak to every Latino and it's not meant to. But there are broad trends that we hope to capture. One of those trends is the trend that Dom just addressed, that Latinos are a growing share of the US population and a growing share of the US electorate. There's about 36.2 million Latinos who are eligible voters in the election this year. And that's about almost 15% of the electorate. I think what's important to remember is that that's a significant share of the US electorate, and that's still only half of Latinos in the US There are about 50% of Latinos that are not yet eligible voters, some of whom are not naturalized citizens yet, and most of whom are just too young to vote.

0:05:46.2 DO: When thinking about Latino voters, there's some important things to note or useful things to note when thinking about differences between Latino voters and other voters in the US. Latino voters are a lot younger. They're much heavier, more heavily represented in the lower age groups especially in the 18 to 29 age group than the rest of the US. There's a lot more foreign born Latino voters. About 25%, about a quarter of the Latino electorate is born outside of the US that they're naturalized citizens and that's a formative factor in their experience and their attitudes. And they're also less likely to have a college degree than other US voters. So when thinking about appeals to different subsets of the American population, often appeals to non-college Americans can resonate more with many Latinos. When thinking about the ebbs and flows of the Latino electorate, you can see that this is the vote share according to the national exit poll since 2000 when we started having reasonable numbers of Latinos in the exit polls, it's often hovered around kind of like a two to one margin, about a 65, 35 breaks, somewhere around there with about 65% or so percent supporting Democrats and about 35% or so percent supporting Republicans.

0:07:04.2 DO: We've seen that go up and we've seen that go down for each group. And right now we're at an interesting point where we've seen kind of a cooling towards the Democratic party among Latinos with some projections suggesting that it could get even cooler. And a significant share will be supporting Trump this electorate more than supported them in 2020 or 2016. So that's something that people are curious about. Of course, these are polls that often don't represent Latinos very well. So we'll see how much those expectations, employee numbers pan out.

0:07:39.0 DO: I think it's really also important to know that all of these national numbers are interesting and can be useful, but what really matters in US elections are what's happening in the states. 'cause that's where you win electoral college votes. And so when we're talking about Latino voters, a lot of people are paying particular attention to two swing states, Arizona and Nevada, which right now polls put them at like a 0.5% point difference between Harris and Trump. And those are states where Latinos compose a significant share of the electorate, Arizona with 25% of the electorate being Latino in Nevada with 22% of the electorate identifying as Latino.

0:08:16.4 DO: That being said, the other swing states that everyone's paying attention to Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Michigan. They don't have as large of a Latino electorate, but we're still paying attention 'cause we're again talking about tiny, tiny margins of difference between the two major campaigns. So a lot of people are thinking about what matters to Latino voters and how that varies between different states and how campaigns might speak to these different interests across different states.

0:08:44.6 DO: I think the last point that I think Chuck is especially well equipped to address is that Latinos have tended to turn out to vote at lower rates than other sets of the electorate turnout did increase in 2020 among Latinos. There was actually a record high according to recent data with 54% of the Latino electorate showing up to vote. I think Chuck was appropriately pointed out that what this often doesn't capture is two important things. Again, our electorate is younger, so younger voters overall tend to turn out at lower rates. So if Latinos have a larger share of the electorate that's young, of course our overall turnout is gonna look a little bit different. The other thing is that a lot of the Latinos that are represented in our electorate are also either second generation, third generation Latinos. And so sometimes it takes, often we learn about politics and political preferences from our parents. So if our parents were eligible voters, that often decreases the likelihood that you will be an active voter. And so often that contributes to lower participation rates. But there's a lot of energy about increasing these levels of engagement and that's something that I'm really excited to have Chuck address. So with that very quick summary, I will turn it over to Chuck. Please join me.

[applause]

0:10:06.5 Chuck Rocha: Appreciate you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Well that was nice. It's already something that is easy to see visually, folks take in a lot of what happens in their day visually. I'm fortunate enough to be on TV a lot and I try to explain to folks when I'm doing media training that folks visually learn a lot by just looking at things. And I say that to say, how many of you ever heard the term Latinos are not a monolith? Everybody has. 'cause that's all folks have been saying. Well, my sister Mara and me are both Latinos on the voter file. We actually agree on lots of things. We probably disagree on some things, but on the voter file, we're all lumped together as a Latino voter. And I want you to be thinking about as we have a conversation, the question you've always wanted to ask a senior operative that you may have just never met one to ask Why is this thing happened? 

0:11:17.6 CR: I may not know the answer or I can tell you why it's broken and it's that way. I'm really honored to be in Michigan and it's a crazy time in my life right now because it's so close to the election, that will show how much I also love my sister. Because we are currently working making ads for the Kamala Super Pac 22 house races and two Senate races and in 30 other races around the country. So I understand what's happening in lots of different places. And I've been doing this for 34 years. So I'm one of the most senior operatives in the country and probably the senior most Latino, which just means I'm old. And I started when I was really young. I think that as I said today at lunch, when you hear me talk, you need to root yourself in understanding that I'm not with the big capital NOT with a line underneath it, your stereotypical democratic operative.

0:12:24.5 CR: I was raised in a trailer house in East Texas, hence why I speak like my white grandfather. My Mexican grandfather was from Guanajuato, Mexico. My father left when I was five. My mother likes to tell a joke that she had two kids and was divorced and wasn't old enough to get in a nightclub. That means I've lived and seen a lot of things that most democratic consultants didn't experience, their fathers or mothers probably did or their grandparents or their grandmothers did. But I experienced these things myself, which makes me a better operative when I'm figuring out strategies of how to persuade voters. I just happened to be a brown operative, but I really didn't turn brown. I didn't say this at lunch. I really didn't turn brown until later in life. That means I wasn't looked as a Latino operative. I went to work in a factory when I was 20.

0:13:14.0 CR: I had a kid around that time. I was living in my great-grandmama's house up the road from my grandmama on the front of the little farm. And because of that I got active in the Labor movement and being active in the Labor movement meant I became a union steward and worked my way up through the union, but not as a Latino. I happened to be Latino, but I was a union steward, then became an officer of my local union and then learned about campaigns through the eyes of local union. And then when you being in Michigan in the home of the UAW that meant something. It meant something in a rural town in east Texas too. And you should know that. So I tell you that to say that the experience I have of running campaigns or understanding campaigns was almost from an ignorance of not knowing any better.

0:14:02.3 CR: I just went and worked on campaigns, got to leave the union and do work around local community of putting up yard signs, which I thought was really cool. Knocking on doors, hauling tables and chairs to barbecues, handing out leaflets. Remember when we handed out leaflets at work sites when the shift change happened and we would hand out the leaflets. That's how I got my start. And at no point does that start mean that I went to a college or I did a thesis if I said that right, or that I did whatever kind of learning that these amazing folks do at this university and others. And I'm honored now to get to speak all over the country at universities, everywhere. And I never darkened the hall of one my entire life. That doesn't make me better than you or you better than me. It makes me compliment many of things that you think about or a professor like her thinks about every day trying to dissect numbers.

0:14:54.5 CR: She needs somebody like me. Guess what I need? I need somebody like her. 'cause I don't understand all the data and the science that goes into a lot of things. It's just beyond my knowledge set. I know a lot about campaigns. I know a lot about strategy. I know a lot about people that make me really good at what I do. But the compliment of understanding and melding what a modern campaign looks like compared to a campaign that I started doing where I had voter sheets on a piece of paper. I had a beeper instead of a cell phone. And I was trying to figure out like all the ins and outs of when every shift change was. So I knew when to get leaflets faxed to all the local unions.

0:15:35.3 CR: It was a different time. But people are still people. We've become way more toxic in the way we deal with each other because I think of social media and other things, which is put different groups in different prayer views and then Donald Trump upsetted that entire apple cart. Some could say Barack Obama did the same thing on the other side of the equation, maybe not with being nasty or in the way that he talks about other folks, but it was a point in time that motivated lots of people to be involved in the process. But when you think about the Latino vote and you think about what the professor said about where we lived, and you saw all those dark areas of where you assume lots of Latinos live, Florida, Texas, New York, Michigan, Chicago, you should understand when you're looking at numbers, especially national polls and surveys.

0:16:27.2 CR: And we'll get into this in a little bit and I wrote some things on my phone while ago to remind me of some topics I want to hit on, a national survey will tell you the ways that the sample talking to Latinos and how they reacted in a national survey. And then we'll try to make that figure out is that gonna help or hurt this candidate that 'cause a news organization wants to talk about the horse race 'cause that's what sells books and what sells airtime. 70%. This is a round number professor of Latinos do not live in a battleground state. That means that all the national numbers you see on Latinos, 70% of the Latinos that they're talking to will never see an advertisement from any candidate. Donald Trump or Kamala Harris is not running an ad in Florida, Texas, California, New York or Illinois.

0:17:19.3 CR: 70% of the Latinos live there. And unless they live in a targeted congressional seat, which there's only a handful of in those states, they're not seeing any advertisements from anybody. But we expect them to act like everybody else. And we'll get into the age dynamic in a little bit. But that's the biggest through line in why Latinos act the way they do or what's different now than it was many years ago. The other thing that's very different in the way that I look at this is born from not just the lack of education or where I grew up, but life experiences. When we talk about why are we underperforming with non-college educated men today on any news channel you turn on, they're talking about black men.

0:18:02.5 CR: Earlier this week when the New York Times came out this weekend with their Latino numbers, they were talking about the Latino vote and Latino men. As one of those non-college educated Latino men. There's not very many of me involved in campaigns, and we'll get to this later as well. We have lagged behind in the way that we do campaigns by encouraging or having ways to enter the political realm with people of color, to have senior enough positions to have an influence over strategy that's actually meant to reach those voters. That seems pretty elementary and I wish I was kidding about that.

0:18:34.0 CR: But I'm not. And because I've lived through one of three major life experiences, it's made me have a lens to see the way that lots of other folks do. Whether it was being a single father at the age of 20 and raising my boy who's 35 today, a union steam fitter in Pittsburgh with two beautiful 8-year-old grandkids who I make call me Abuelo. And they think my name is Abuelo 'cause they're two little white boys who I need to remind every day that they're Mexican. So I make them call me Abuelo. That I never went to college. And so learning about things to me still today at 55 is like a little boy. I was talking about being at a wedding in Mexico City. Me and my new wife of now two months, love to travel. And we love to travel because she grew up very poor in Washington DC She's a fifth generation Washingtonian and her daddy was one of the original like black activists in DC and she's never really been anywhere either.

0:19:32.4 CR: And when we go places, we discover things together like little kids. 'Cause I'm hungry to learn. There's lots of people like that who don't get to see things who are hungry to learn. The problem with the internet when you wanna learn about politics is there's so much fractured information and so many people putting out so much information. Not all of it is in fact factual. So there's a lot of misinformation that people that tend to be younger, that have a through line of being the most non-college educated group of folks, sometimes get sucked down a rabbit hole of things that just aren't true. Not that they're bad people, not that they're ignorant in any way. They're just like my friends I grew up with. So these life experiences I think have a lot to do with that. You throw in multicultural, multilingual, multi-generational in most houses, it becomes a very complex thing that we wanna fit into a very non complex political basket.

0:20:24.8 CR: 'Cause it's efficient that way because at the end of the day, politics is a business. Sure it's public policy and affects all our lives, but it's a multi, with a B, billion dollar industry. There will be $2 billion worth of advertising for God's sakes. Kamala Harris just announced she's raised a billion dollars since she's been in the race. So it ain't about the lack of money, it's about the efficiencies of that money. And because Democrats, the party of policy, master's degrees and algorithms, sometimes we overcomplicate that because we're wanting efficiencies of the way things are supposed to work because it's the smart thing and it is to do, which leaves a lot of folks out who may wanna attempt to be in that process but don't get a chance to 'cause it doesn't meet the algorithm or they don't fit into that box completely. I've had a lot of life experiences, whether it's being a single father, having a criminal record from 14 years ago, or other mistakes that I have made where I've come out the other side of all of those with experiences that makes me, when I'm sitting, that makes me, when I'm sitting in a strategy session or I'm sitting with Bernie Sanders when we're arguing about the right way to do this ad in Nevada, they would defer to me.

0:21:43.2 CR: And I give... I almost called him the old man. I only call him that to his face. The senator would give me deference on certain things and we would argue about race, politics and economic politics. But when it came to culture, he would defer 'cause he knew he didn't know. That takes a lot from people who think they know a lot. Especially to a guy who never went to college who has this accent who sometimes says and don't know when to keep his mouth quiet. So as we learn these experiences, the Latino vote comes into this. And that's why I'm really excited to be here today because I was speaking in the back while ago to my brother from San Antonio and I was talking about stories I heard working in San Antonio about this immigration of all these Mexicans in the '60s and '70s that came to Michigan.

0:22:30.1 CR: I came here to work in the auto parts to work in the auto plants. They heard there were jobs here and they migrated. They left the valley like there was a good friend of mine Who she still works for Chrysler here, who I met, my God, 27 years ago, running the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement which was started by the UAW Latinos which was a labor group of Latinos, who she's still here today and her father and her uncles were boot makers in the valley and they still have a boot making shop there. And it was through those stories. Again, cultural competency I would've not learned this, but I was on the campaign trail, learned about this. Now her kids are here. She's had like 10 kids, like all of this. This is the Latino vote. So I'm honored to be here. I'm gonna be quiet and sit down. Why don't you come join me and let's have a conversation and be thinking about your questions. I think I'm supposed to be on this side.

0:23:27.2 DO: They told me to pressure you to sit on that side.

0:23:28.6 CR: Okay. I can't sit on... One thing I can learn now that I'm married is to follow directions.

0:23:33.1 DO: Well, I'm so glad you're here. I told you we're gonna nerd out over some the experiences you've had. And one thing I just wanted to start off with is by highlighting some of the work you did for the Sanders campaign. You were widely known and recognized for developing a really impactful strategy for Sanders. And I wanted to ask you to say more about why you think it was so effective and why it was so much more effective than other democratic campaign strategies in their outreach efforts to Latinos.

0:24:03.8 CR: That's a great question and I'm probably as proud of that as I am of anything that I've ever done. I wrote a book about it called Teal Bernie. Because I wanted to tell the story of these Latino kids that worked with me. There's a couple reasons and very little of it has to do with me. It has to do with, and you'll read about this in my book, that I had worked for Bernie in '16 as just a strategist, a mail consultant mail being M-A-I-L consultant and helping them staff up and helping them do lots of different things. Jack of all trades. This thing started to really ramp up. They invited me back in 2020. The chief strategist Jeff Weaver started talking to me about, and I wrote about this, about the first meeting we'd had years in advance of the Bernie Sanders race and whether he wanted to do that again.

0:24:51.8 CR: But figuring out what my role would be to make sure that we could center Latinos in positions of power was very intentional by me. Jeff came to me and he put me in charge of finding a campaign manager five months before we launched the Bernie Sanders campaign. And I went out and I interviewed folks and I was looking for folks. And finally Jeff came to me two months out and said to me "the Senator wants you to do it. He likes you. He trusts you. You can do this. We want you to be the manager." Now think about that. Remember what I just said at that podium about where I came from. The people I grew up with, the money I had growing up. I had none of this. And I was being asked to manage a presidential campaign.

0:25:37.8 CR: So I said, "look, I need to think on this, this thing's too good to be true. Let me think on it." So I started calling advisors and friends of mine and I talked to lots of people over that week and I talked to a guy named, we'll call him Tim 'cause we're being live streamed. I don't know if Tim would want his name out there, but he's a consultant to Bernie and he handles a lot of the online stuff. And he said, "Chuck, you should know that there's a million people on Twitter that love Bernie Sanders and would walk on water for Bernie Sanders over hot coals." He said, "there's another million people on the internet that hate everything about Bernie Sanders and still blame him for Hillary Clinton not winning in '16. And they will hate you. They will hate your family and they will come after you and your family relentlessly."

0:26:20.6 CR: He's like, "keep that in mind if this is what you wanna do, but this is the facts." And I thought about it. I sat with it and I started thinking about my family and the business I had built and thinking about my record. I'm very open about talking about my criminal record and coming out the other side of that, paying my price and all the successes I've had in my life. I've been after that. So there is a redemption piece of this. But I knew people would bring that up. And I thought maybe it would hurt Bernie or hurt somebody else if this is all they talked about is that this former guy who had a record was now managing a presidential race no matter all the other things I'd already done in my career.

0:26:55.6 DA: So I went to Bernie and to Jeff and said, "you need to find a boy scout or a girl scout to run this thing. Somebody who's married." I wasn't married. My kids was grown and gone. "Find somebody with a beautiful husband or wife with a bunch of little kids who don't drink, who don't cuss, who knows how to keep their mouth quiet. And that's who you need to manage this thing. Not me." I'm like, "if you want me to run the campaign, I said, Bernie, I love you and I love Jeff and I'll never be able to forgive you or thank you for this opportunity. I was like, I'll run it. I'll run every aspect of it. I'll hire the staff, I'll develop the plan, I'll write the ads. But you need to put somebody in the chair who's your manager. Not me, just for that reason. 'cause I don't wanna do anything to hurt you or this campaign because of mistakes I've made years ago." And we found fast secure, who by the way lived one block from me who was the ACLU political director who was the first Muslim to ever manage a congressional race who had a beautiful wife who was a lawyer and two of the cutest little girls you've ever laid eyes on.

0:27:55.6 CR: And we made him the manager. And he traveled with Bernie. He dealt with a lot of the press and he did the rallies. And I built a headquarters downstairs underneath the regular headquarters. And I managed this thing from that going forward. This answers your question because I hired the first 400 staffers. I put people of color and centered women of color because of the problems he had had in this race in '16 in positions of power in every single department that we had. They were either the directors or the deputy directors, women of color in each one of those. And bilingual Latinas or Latinos. I did not have a Latino department. I didn't make it a separate siloed operation. This was the success and the secret to success. And then I hired a lot of staff in the states and the state directors. I hired all of them.

0:28:39.8 CR: All people that come from the grassroots, all people from the community. Lots and lots of people of color, lots of Latinos. Same thing in Nevada. The political director was Latina, the deputy state director was Latina and a hundred Latino staffers that weren't on the ground for the last six weeks, but were on the ground for eight months. These are the things that don't happen every day in a campaign because A, we had a lot of privilege 'cause we were raising a lot of money 'cause it was Bernie Sanders. And because I was one of three people that got to sign off on a budget, I could hire anybody I wanted to hire. I could set the campaign up any way I wanted to. So it was with the intentionality from the beginning, to center Latinos in positions of where I knew they would have a say so in the comms department, the field department, the distributed department, and then me overseeing that, making sure that the mail, the TV and the digital, all the paid apparatuses of that were done with a layer of cultural competency where my firm were making Spanish ads made by immigrants, messagings to immigrants.

0:29:38.0 CR: And then the last thing I'll say about this piece is, when we developed the "Latino plan," at that point we probably had 100 employees and 50 of them, 40 of them were Latinos of all the employees of the, almost of the union of the campaign. We had a meeting in the headquarters and I brought 'em all together. And I put big sheets of white paper on the board. Because I'm very old school about this and I obviously not very good with computers and all the things I've talked about.

0:30:04.6 CR: I said, "let's write a plan." And they were like, "what do you mean?" I'm like, "let's write a plan. What do you want Bernie Sanders to do? What do you want him to say about immigration? What do you want him to say about this thing?" And so we just started writing what I'd call an outline. And I used that to develop every piece of things that we did in the campaign that were developed. A lot of Docker recipients were in this meeting. We had a lot of Docker recipients on the campaign about the way they wanted to see this thing structured. So I gave them a voice. People in here. You are all college educated, smart people. You would think, well that's common sense. I'm sure that happens all the time in every campaign. Let me assure you, it doesn't happen in any campaign. I'm working on 40 campaigns right now. It ain't happening on none of them. No disparity to Kamala Harris. I'm not on the inside of her campaign. It could actually be happening. I don't know that. I'm legally on the other side of a wall running an independent expenditure, helping them make ads for that. So it could be, 'cause she does have the resources, but most campaigns are so cash strapped that every penny has to go into the next mail piece, Digital ad or TV ad. And we can talk about that later.

0:31:08.3 DO: Yeah. I think that's a really good point. We know that there's, Latinos report that they've been contacted less often by fewer campaign materials in terms of ads, in terms of individuals, in terms of mail. And so you're saying that you started before, there's a lot of competition. If you start early, then you can kind of engage Latinos before they're getting a lot of counter appeals.

0:31:30.8 CR: I didn't wanna interrupt. I got so excited. And by the way, for all of you out there that feel like you're the most important person in the room every time you're talking, I've had to teach myself not to interrupt people. 'cause I feel like whatever I gotta say is really important. So I make myself and I teach this in media training. I don't know if we get off the sidebar, but to keep your teeth together. Sometimes I chew on my tongue too to not interrupt, but to think about what you wanna say and keep that rotating so you'll keep your point without interrupting somebody that's interviewing you. The point about that is the reason Bernie Sanders won 73% of the Latino vote in Nevada is because we had started that eight months out. In any campaign that I'm working in today, all the Latino focused stuff, which means Spanish language communication is just one way to measure, is always too late. People will say, well, we get them who speak English in the general market communication. Well that's great. And you do get some of the folks like me who act like a white man. 'cause I'm watching hunting and fishing shows on tv, ESPN, like your partner.

0:32:28.1 CR: Like I like that. But I'm the exception, not the rule. And what I say when I'm in a strategy session to push back on that is I'm like, "well, the average age of Latino is 28, your ad is focused on a white woman in the suburbs with a choice message because that is in fact something that moves her. And she is a persuadable voter. So if you think a 28-year-old Latino dude is watching the same thing that a 45-year-old white woman is in the suburbs, I think you're wrong. Like I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure you're wrong." And so that's why you should start earlier because you can own the mailboxes or the advertisement when there's no competition. And it's just the... It seems too easy, complicated. And that I'm making this stuff up. But it's in fact harder to do when you're in a meeting with somebody about strategy for a campaign when you only have X amount of dollars and they only want to talk to voters when they're voting or right before they start voting.

0:33:25.3 DO: And that's been like a very consistent finding in political science research too. Something else I know you said you might be able to speak to is just laying out where, how Latinos are influencing or where their role is when we think about the presidential election, important senate races, important congressional races.

0:33:44.5 CR: Most important question asked tonight is this. And I want all of you to tell people this, and it's not hyperbole, if I'm using that word in the right way, is that Latinos will single handedly determine who controls all three branches of government. And let me make my case. In the Senate races, based off what the professor put up, whoever wins Arizona and Nevada, where there's lots of Latinos who have a pretty good saying who's the president. But let's just say Donald Trump wins both of those. Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, all between four and eight points Latino. The margin will be so small. And as you've seen in recent polling in those states, not national, we're a very persuadable audience. So if the Latino vote moves from 65, what the professor said has pretty much been the baseline for support for Democrats down to 59, she loses those rates 'cause Latinos did not perform at the rate that they had historically. That's why they get to determine us, the Latino vote in those states, who is there and who will win? I said this last night on CNN, white College educated voters may save Democrats and Kamala Harris ' presidential campaign because they are so over performing while Latinos, mainly Latino men and African American, mainly the men not underperforming. They're already at above average Latinos and over 85%. But because it's not 90 with black men or 60 with Latino men, you just drop a couple percentages. Just the tiniest percentage.

0:35:25.0 CR: And this could be the difference in the election because it's just so close. They wanted me to talk last night about how black men were letting the party down and underperforming. I'm like, it's really hard for me to do that when they're voting at 85%. Now I get it. The women are gonna save us again. And black women are at 92% and 93%. They're like, well the black. I'm like, it's more complicated than that. News cycles wants this to be black and white and be this easy answer. And it's not just an easy answer. But this is how Latinos are gonna be the deciding factor in the presidential campaign in the Senate races it's the same group of states. It's the same elections because the presidential election is just a series of Senate or governors races, state by state. The Latinos in Pennsylvania will get to that Or Puerto Rican and Dominican. The Latinos in Milwaukee are Mexican. The Latinos in Arizona act different than the Latinos in Nevada. 'cause A hundred thousand new Latinos vote moved to Nevada every other month for the service industry or move out.

0:36:25.1 CR: It's a very transient population. But who's taking the time to really know all these nuances? A well-intentioned woke white person, who has two master's degree? I mean, if they're wrong or anything's wrong with him, nothing is. They just may not understand the cultural relevance of what the messaging should be. And that's the Senate. So the Senate today is tied, we're probably gonna lose Montana. Latinos are gonna be a huge factor in Ohio that nobody's talking about. There's a big Latino population right outside of Cleveland on the west side. There was a Latino state rep elected from there. Latinos in Arizona, Nevada where their Senate races. I'm the general consultant for Ruben Gallego in Arizona. It's one of my senate races. I just left Arizona where it was 108 to come here where it's 45. There's big differences. Are there ever. So Arizona is one of those states. And then when you get to the congressional level, it's even crazier. Think about this. Stay with me you nerds. 'cause I know you're nerds like me. 17 congressional races that Joe Biden won, that's currently represented by a Republican congressman. Lemme say that slower for you folks in the back. 17 districts that are currently have a Republican congressman, but Joe Biden won that district four years ago.

0:37:42.7 CR: Of those 17 seats, 10 of them are in New York and California. You think New York and California is gonna see any Kamala Harris or Donald Trump advertising? No. Is there a Senate race there? No, there is kind of a Senate race in California, but I don't count it. There's no real advertising going on there. What's Garvey's name, the baseball player, Steve Garvey? Anyway it's crazy town, but they there's no real Senate race there. So these house races, for the first time in American history, because of redistricting and because we've grown outside of major urban areas, there's more Latinos in what we call persuadable marginal congressional seats. Well, Chuck, what do you mean by marginal seat? I'm calling a marginal seat is a seat that fluctuates from year to year on performance professor, plus or minus three or four points. So if it's 51, 49, 52, 47, Democrat, Republican, back and forth, that means either party can win that race because of the 235 seats, 200 of them are very safely Republican or Democrat. If you wanna ask Chuck Roach to answer one question about what's wrong with our democracy, it's redistricting and that there's no competition for house seats. So you don't have to be accountable to anybody except a primary challenge from your right or your left.

0:39:07.9 CR: So it makes everybody run to their corners except for these 35 seats in the middle. But the great news for Latinos is because of our growth of those 35 seats, 12 of them have more than 35% Latino population. And of those six of them are majority Latino seats. That's never happened before. Up until this redistricting that happens every 10 years, there was just one or two, maybe three marginal Latino heavy seats, Texas 23, one of the Orange County seats, and normally the seat that was the Keys and south of Miami. But that's all changed with redistricting. Now we have Latinos running in southern New Mexico, Denver. There could be a Latino named Tony Vargas win the Omaha, Nebraska seat, and it's only like 18% Latino. It's 12% actually.

0:40:00.9 CR: All those races in New York, New York, stay with me now, 4, 18, 17, 22, 24, all marginal seats. In California, 9, 13, 22, 27, 45. I know I'm a little rain man with this stuff, but all of these seats will have a lot of Latino population. All the Latino population is a little bit different. Latinos north of LA, where Mike Garcia, a Republican named Mike Garcia, is running for Congress to be reelected, is a much different Latino, same state, same Mexican origin than California 22, which is between Bakersfield and Fresno. You know some of the differences there, nuanced? Is that in northern LA County, where California 27 is, those Latinos live out in the suburbs. They don't buy houses outside the city. They live in large, like they got houses, they got pools, they have second, third generation, like to live out there in northern LA County, you got to have some jingles. California 22 is the is the most marginal congressional seat in America with the lowest college graduation rate. Or when you look at non-college educated population, that's what I was looking for. It's the lowest of any congressional seat in America that is marginal. That means it can go back and forth. There's a lot of non-college educated folks in safe Republican seats.

0:41:32.2 CR: I'll leave that for a TED Talk for another day. But in this one, you have these poor farm worker rooted California 22, Fresno, Bakersfield, Tulare, all of these. I've been out there, man, and I snarl because it's a lot of feedlots, dairy farms, oil rigs, and folks who own big swap. It's the breadbasket of America. It's where all the produce and fruit you eat comes from. And then you have the suburb. But then you expect a political consultant to go into a congressional race where on the voter file, it just shows Latino. And anybody with half a brain knows, well, these Latinos got to be all Mexican. It's here in California, and they are. But culturally, they couldn't be more different. So you need to understand that when you're having that conversation with them. And us as Democrats, very well meaning, we'll go in and do some polling and figure out what people feel about choice or democracy or whatever the thing of the day is and think you can go in there. And then not recruit a Latino candidate in California 27 and run a white Democrat in a 50-50 seat against a Republican Latino named Garcia and not understand why we're losing a little bit of Latinos to the Republican party in this seat.

0:42:44.2 CR: I can tell you why. I ain't never been to school. His name is Garcia. Everybody in here knows 15 people named Garcia. Folks who ain't looking at what the policy is of everybody, it's well-meaning Tom Garcia who walks in the polling booths like, "oh, cousin Mike's running. Republican, he's got to be alright. His name's Garcia." And it's just like these little nuances are things that we miss. Sorry.

0:43:05.5 DO: No, I mean, we've seen descriptive representation matters when you have, when you're not sure, when there's a lot of conflicting messages about candidates, when there's a lot of conflicting messages about policies. We often rely on these alternative cues about what sounds familiar and what sounds like something...

0:43:21.7 CR: And you throw in there that we're younger. We don't get as much information. Nobody's talking to us because we're younger. I keep going back to younger because the way that we run a modern campaign is we run a data set that says we're only gonna talk to people who have the highest likelihood to be persuadable and then the ones who have the highest likelihood to turn out. So if you have never voted, A, we're never gonna talk to you. If you've only voted in one or two elections, we're probably still not gonna talk to you. If you vote in every other election, you have a shot to get into the turnout model where we're actually having a conversation. And that's the way modern campaigns are run. That's why so many people don't hear the message. And then when you have, this will answer the age old question, are Latinos moving right? 

0:44:09.2 CR: And then when you have a candidate like a Donald Trump that everybody knows, even if you're getting information or not, because his name is Donald Trump and he's in everybody's algorithm of their social media and the media is consumed by him and talks about him at every chance that they get, then you know that there's this crazy guy who wants to disrupt the system, who wants to drain the swamp, who wants to put America first, who has a hat that says "he wants to make America great again." That sounds pretty cool. Now most Latinos will go, "yeah, but he's still crazy." Yeah, I get that. But it's enough of a message that resonates with enough of the folks where you start seeing a siphoning off of two points, four points, a movement amongst men, blah, blah, blah.

0:44:50.2 CR: And then you have a multimedia society and that's where you start seeing an erosion of a electorate that is maturing before our eyes, getting older, more English based, more second, third generation. So you start seeing these things build on themselves 'cause there's not a silver bullet about why we're moving.

0:45:10.0 DO: That's really helpful. Something else that you pointed out in your book, and I don't know if you still continue with this, but you kind of built a reputation for your focus on print mail and mail outreach. Is that still something that you dedicate as much time and attention to where in a time when people are spending so much more on ads, on television ads, on social media ads, are you still, do you still think a good print mail campaign is important? 

0:45:34.7 CR: It goes back to an earlier question. I love mail 'cause you can touch it. You can feel it and I can promise you, I'll tell you this, I sell mail. I promise you you're gonna touch the mail. You're gonna at least touch it long enough to get it out of your mailbox and walk into the trash can and throw it away. You may not ever put eyes on it, but you touched it. I can't really believe a digital consultant who says they actually served you a digital ad. I know you touched my mail piece and you may have thrown it away. I tell you that funny fact to say the piece you asked me about earlier is the key to this. Sending it early when there's nothing else in the mailbox. In the last four weeks, when all of you who are regular voters are getting 10 pieces of mail from all different kinds of people, you ain't reading none of that trash 'cause it's just all piled in your mailbox.

0:46:16.3 CR: But if I sent you that in the summertime with some catchy picture on the front of it or something else that would gain your attention, that dollar goes so much further. So yes, we do a lot of mail because in a multimedia society, where you can't really reach people the way you could reach 'em. And what I mean by that is I'm an old man relatively. That means that I was born and grew up without the internet or a cell phone. That meant if the president was on TV that evening, my night was ruined 'cause he was on every channel and it was only three. It's a much different world now. I watch TV while scrolling on my damn phone. Excuse me on my darn phone. And I think a lot of other people do the same thing. And it's hard to reach folks and the younger you are the harder it is to reach you. If you were to say to me "Chuck, what's the number one way to get to Latinos? It's YouTube. We're the highest consumer of YouTube information. YouTube is gold to us." But mail would be a second. If you do it early enough and you make it eye-popping. We did a piece in North Carolina with the caricature of Walter Mercado. Anybody here know who that is? 

0:47:37.0 DO: Yes I can see the Mucho Mucho Amor.

0:47:40.3 CR: Mucho, Mucho Amor. And it was such a local graphic artist did it, Latina. And it was so popular people were sending us the local community-based organization. They were taking screenshots of it. They put a magnet and put it on their refrigerator for good luck.

0:47:57.2 DO: That's pretty good.

0:47:58.2 CR: So this is a way you get people to hold the mail, right? I have put spinning wheels on it. I put pictures of puppies. I've put something on to grab somebody's attention. But that's why it's more popular 'cause it's if you can get there early. Mail the last two weeks nobody's reading it.

0:48:14.6 DO: Yeah, that's interesting 'cause when we look at social media impact we talk about views, but we don't really know at least with mail. You're like you looked at it enough to know that you wanna throw it in the trash. But that's more of a view.

0:48:23.3 CR: The views just mean it went by. You don't know somebody looked at it.

0:48:25.2 DO: That's really interesting.

0:48:27.0 CR: And I don't trust consultants and I am a consultant. So I think some half of that's made up.

0:48:32.8 DO: Okay. I wanna go back to something else you said. We've talked a lot about you know, that there has been some siphoning off of Latino Democrats towards the Republican Party. And we've talked about whether there's been a lot of questions about one, whether this is happening. I think most people would say it is real. I think the second question that comes after that is whether this is just a Trump effect or if this is like a broader shifting of the electorate. If this is a broader realignment, I think some people would say. Do you have any position on the two of this is just Trump effect or a real realignment happening? 

0:49:07.1 CR: It's both. There's scientific facts off the voter file that in '16 and this is from the Catalyst Institute that Latinos moved eight points on average to Trump. What did I say when I began this talk 70% of Latinos don't live in a battleground state never saw an advertisement. They just knew a guy named Trump and they were watching enough social media where they thought Hillary was a bad thing. So most of that over performance was in Miami and in the Texas Valley which moved double digits while the rest of the country really moved three or four points in places like Eastern Pennsylvania was three points where a lot of Puerto Ricans are in Allentown. So it is some Trump effect because somebody like Kari Lake in Arizona gets Ruben Gallego. Somebody was smart enough to get a Mexican to run for Senate in Arizona. Gallego is over performing now. His name is Gallego. He's a Marine and he's running against Kari Lake, but Kari Lake is not matching the numbers for Trump. If it was about their messaging, she should be whooping and doing the same, but she ain't. So there is a Trump effect. The real question will be after this election. How much did it realign? 

0:50:18.0 CR: Now and what I think will happen and I've only been doing this 35 years, so I don't know that much is that it swung eight points in 2022. It stayed the same. It didn't move back, but it didn't move anymore in the off-year election. Experts will say that there was about a half a point. It never moved. But this presidential election, I think it does not move any more rights. Don't believe these national polls that says that she's at 58 and Joe Biden's at 61. She'll get back there. Latinos vote late. They make their mind late 'cause we're younger. Hey, remember? She'll come back to the Biden number and probably do just a little bit better, but won't get back to where Obama was. And that's not because there's movement. It's because of so many new voters. 22% of the Latino electorate in this election will be a new voter. 22%. 40% of the Latino vote in this election will be a new voter since 2016. We're just younger. And if you don't think that a new 20-year-old voter is different, think about your kid and are you the same as your kid and think the same as your kid? Like 20 years ago, I had acid watch jeans and a mullet.

0:51:32.3 CR: Like I'm different than I was then and my kid is different. So we can't look at it apples to apples. The way that I talk about this on TV is when they wanna pound about the horse racing, the Latinos, I'm like, "look, you have an electorate that's coming of age and some of it is Republican curious young people who haven't heard from either party. But the bottom line right now is you have a little bit of a lot of men who've only heard an issue about abortion if they've heard any issue who are trying to figure out who's with them, who's gonna help them. While you have women, Latinas, over-performing, way over-performing." And then when you average that out, it just shows a little bit of a slippage towards Republicans. I think you start seeing some of that line up. If you worry, you do better at germesting and deliver the message. I am the firm believer that presidential politics are not about policy. I know that's gonna make a lot of you master degree people, your head explode, but it's got nothing to do with policy.

0:52:39.6 CR: If you care about policy, you've already picked a team and you're already voting and you're a Democrat or you're Republican. Presidential elections are about who you trust and who you like, where your gut is, who do you wanna run the country? It's an executive, not a, your congressional race, you wanna ask a policy questions and people do wanna know about policy in congressional races and Senate races. But at the presidential election, it's about who you like and who you trust. Did anybody watch the vice presidential debate? Did you notice how nice JD Vance came across and how he was softening his tone? And when he would talk, now I have prepped somebody for a presidential debate. I've prepped lots of senators and I'm good at debates. Like the way Kamala Harris handled Donald Trump was a chef's kiss. The way she'd lay a little cheese out and he'd scurry right over there and eat it. And she kept laying out bait. He just kept running right over there and get it 'cause he couldn't help himself and she knew it.

0:53:33.0 CR: And somebody smart around her knew his ego was so big, he could not help himself. When JD Vance did the opposite of that, he understands 'cause he sold a movie, he sold a book, that he couldn't come off as the, I can't say that so, came across as a mean person. So he softened his tone. He's like "me and... I don't got a problem... I have no problem with Mr. Walz. I don't like Kamala Harris" or whatever he called her. He won't call her her real name, but he... I don't have a problem 'cause he was trying to make America like him because all America had seen for six weeks was that he didn't think that women who didn't have any children had to say so in American politics. And that ain't real good when half the population in the world is, in the world, in America is women. And again, as a man who's been married for 60 days, you don't wanna make a woman mad. Promise that. And so these are the nuances of needing them to like you.

0:54:27.3 CR: People have been like, "well, why is Kamala not out there beating him up over this, this, and this?" And she's getting that 'cause it's now come to the closing argument part. But she first needed to introduce herself and make people like her first, and then trust her that she was competent 'cause she's a woman. And a lot of people in this country ain't about a woman. Like, it's just the way things are. It's sexist, it's wrong, and it's disgusting in so many ways. But she had to make people be like, A, I'm likable. B, I'm a real person. C, I had a single mother. Couldn't buy a house till we were in high school. Worked at McDonald's. I'm trying to relate. All that was strategy. This is what I do every day. And then it was, "I was a senator. I've prosecuted drug dealers and people trafficking amphetamines, women, guns, whatever it was at the border," and trying to make her resume be like, okay, she could do this job. I like her, and I trust her.

0:55:12.0 CR: 'cause I sure don't like him. I might vote for him 'cause I want a tax cut, and I'm a rich guy. Or I may vote for him because of my religious whatever. Again, if it's policy, you already picked a team. So it's about who you like. And Latinos, who the average age are 27, we don't know. We never heard from none of them. Older Latinos have. And older Latinos are still voting 70-30 Democrat. Especially Spanish speakers 'cause they've been Democrats for a while. And they've just more educated 'cause they've seen elections come and go. They know Democrats are for workers and blah, blah, blah until Donald Trump stole our language and now has gotten a lot of Latino men over on our side. One of the biggest things that aggravate me about Donald Trump, and as a strategist, game respects game. Like, it's my job to win elections. But if I see a Republican doing something smart, I'll steal it, or I'll try to get my person ready to understand what they're doing. I grew up in a trailer house in East Texas.

0:56:09.9 CR: I went to work in a factory when I was 20 years old. Nobody in my family had ever graduated college or ever talked about voting. My grandmother and me had a conversation one time about, oh my God, Gerald Ford, 'cause I was trying to understand what had happened when he took over the presidency. And I asked her one time if we were Democrats or Republicans. And my grandmother said, "we're Democrats and we vote Democrats 'cause we wanna live like Republicans." Means, and it stuck with me, right? But nobody had ever, my grandma voted in presidential elections, but I didn't get them off till the union. Now I tell you that to say, back to Donald Trump.

0:56:45.6 CR: Listen to this, listen to me speak about this and tell me who it sounds like. "I joined the Democratic Party and got active because there was a threat after NAFTA was passed to shut down my tire factory and move it to China 'cause there was 1,200 men and women working in this factory making small radio passenger tires that you could make overseas and ship them in 'cause they were small radio passenger tires. So we were fighting NAFTA and then we were fighting WTO and free trade with China. I also got involved 'cause I thought powerful people in Washington had too much power. Lobbyist, lawyers, rich folks who, and nobody was standing up for the regular common man, or common woman. That the whole place was rigged towards the rich. They should just go up there and drain the swamp, that nobody was investing in my community after my factory shut down and they shipped my daddy's job to China, and 1,200 men were put out of work. There was no investment to help save them. The union had negotiated them rights to transfer to another factory and to go to junior college. The union, not the government. And so I thought there should be America investment in our America. Sending all this money overseas to all these wars when there's people in my community hurting."

0:58:04.5 CR: I'll stop there. Who does that sound like? This is how he wins. He don't mean any of it, but we've allowed him to steal that language. I helped run Dick Gephardt presidential race in '04. I told you I'm old and I've been doing this a long time. Dick Gephardt would talk about how we're all tied together and he fought in after. That's why I worked for Dick Gephardt. And if you closed your eyes and you didn't know no better, Donald Trump tries to sound like a speech Dick Gephardt could've given every day. But he doesn't mean it. But he knows and they know, again, game respect strategy of game. There's only, there's a limit on how many votes they can get on that side with just rich, powerful people. But they never talk about anything that they do about a policy perspective that's gonna make your life better.

0:58:55.0 CR: They talk about what the Democrats are gonna do to you. They're either gonna turn your kids transgender, they're gonna come take your gun, they're going to... Whatever the social issue of the moment is to tell working class or Latinos You don't want nothing to do with them. Them folks is gonna do all this crazy stuff. Not we're gonna help you get more money, or we're gonna help you do this or do something along a policy because again, who you like, who you trust in a presidential election. Then you... The last thing I'll say on this, and then you layer in Latinos who are not getting all the information. There's been currently, as of today, just under $22 million spent on Spanish language advertising. That's less than 1% of all advertising dollars spent on TV when we are professor. 13, 14% of the electric nationwide. So even if we just did that, let's use real math. I'm using Chuck Roach's spin math. Let's say that 40% of us are just consuming information in Spanish. So at least should be 8% and it's just less than one. And all of that money was spent by it's 90-10 Democrats over Republicans. So while Republicans are saying that they're doing all this great strategy to win Latinos over, they're spending no money to actually do it.

1:00:13.5 CR: $19 million in Spanish was spent by the Kamala Harris campaign or her supporting super pack, while $1 million has been spent by Donald Trump on Spanish language advertising. There's a saying in my business, especially in the Mexican side of my business, "No Peso, No say Say So" So if you ain't spending no money to talk to us, then you really are just talking. I'll stop there.

1:00:35.2 DO: Let me stop too. I wanna open it up. I know other people probably have questions.

1:00:53.9 CR: I liked y'all brought in these fresh flowers for me.

1:00:55.0 DO: Oh, They're rubber. They're definitely rubber.

1:00:57.2 CR: You Think though? Oh, nevermind.

1:01:00.5 Speaker 4: You're Asking the question.

1:01:03.0 CR: No, that's cool. That's cool. Thank you. Very Good.

1:01:07.1 Speaker 4: So then how would a campaign go about reaching the people who aren't reachable? I mean, because like, which social media channel do you try? Which... I mean, there's so many ways of reaching people. How do you as a strategist figure out which one to throw your money at? 

1:01:26.7 CR: This is a great question, and it's gonna surprise some of you. It's not the channel and it is, it's YouTube is number one. When we... Again, sorry to nerd out. When we do digital advertising, we take the voter file that has everybody's name and address and then has your voting history attached to it to come up with the likelihood of you being a persuadable voter and a turnout. And we pull a universe of those people who we wanna digitally advertise to, and then we give that to the digital advertiser and do one-to-one advertising. There's no more of this. Let's just go out here and buy a bunch of Facebook ads like Donald Trump did in '16, which is one of the reasons he won. So I'm not saying it's what you do, it's expanding your target universe. Go broader. Well, when I say that in democratic circles, they're like, "yeah, but Chuck, but you're gonna turn out Republicans."

1:02:18.5 CR: Like if you're going, if you're not using the voter history on turnout or you're wasting your money on people that don't vote, and they say that about Latinos all the time. We don't need to go work about them. They ain't gonna show up. They're young, they never show up. Their history shows they're not gonna show up. Why would they show up this time? It becomes, help me if I say this right, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because if you never do it, it is never gonna happen. But it's not gonna happen 'cause you're never gonna do it. That's what the problem is. What we did with Bernie is what nobody had ever done. Let me give you a quick example of that.

1:02:52.5 CR: In Nevada, in the 2020 caucus, when I went back and pulled in the dataset, the number of Latinos who had caucused in the last caucus, it was 12,000 Latinos. And I was like, well, this is who everybody will target. Known caucus goers, because caucuses are... How can I say this and be dramatic, are extremely difficult to get somebody to come do. You gotta come show up, you gotta stand in a room. You've got to profess your love for your candidate. Like it's Craig, Craig. And for young Latino voters, they're like, "why in the, Why would I wanna do that? That is crazy." And I don't understand what this caucus is and what that has to do with the primary. So there's this whole education element of that. Right? Well, the caucus, the year I was running it, which was 2020, they had expanded.

1:03:39.5 CR: Had a few days of early voting for caucus who you come in and cast your caucus vote a few days early. There still was a caucus on caucus day. But I back up and tell you remember, there was only 12,000 Latinos that had ever caucused. And I knew every campaign in the last 30 or 60 days, we start talking to those people. A, we started eight months in advance. B, we had 100 Latino staffers on the ground. And our headquarters was in the heart of the Latino community in East Las Vegas... And then I took, to your point, this answers your question. I took the data set and I expanded it and looked at how many Latinos had a pretty regular history of voting in Democratic primaries. 100,000 Latinos had voted in democratic primaries, and only 12,000 of those had ever caucus. So I'm like 80,000 new Latino voters right there that are the easiest to talk into coming to take the next step, which is the caucus.

1:04:32.4 CR: And then I took a portion of newly registered Latinos. Young people loved Bernie Sanders. He was kind of a thing with young people, all the things. So I took, and this is again, strategy that nobody will do, is I took any newly registered Latino who lived in a house with another Latino and added another 15,000 people. Now I had a universe and I could start sending them digital ads. I could knock on their door, I could send them a mail piece. I could call and text them from a distributed, y'all understand, distributed organizing where a volunteer can call or text somebody. We were doing that state to state. So this is how we delivered almost 75% of the Latino vote for an old white man from Vermont who talked like billionaires and millionaires.

1:05:24.8 CR: Like that's how that happened it's not the app, but it is the app. But it's early in targeting. When I wrote the book, I said, it's three things. One, it's start early, always start early. We always get there too late. B, expand your universe. And then three, we haven't talked about this and we will, is the cultural competency of your advertisement. If you do all that stuff and then make an ad for Puerto Ricans with burritos and taco trucks, it's gonna land flat. So that's another key is making sure that you're showing up in a culturally competent way to understand these Mexicans in Tulare, in Fresno and other places, mainly come from two states in Mexico. And knowing the difference between the Mexicans from Michoacan and then the other state that they come from Jalisco. These are just nuances that maybe not everybody knows. You all just learned that here today.

1:06:25.8 DO: That's awesome. Other questions? Go ahead.

1:06:29.7 CR: Oh, got a mic coming.

1:06:30.2 DO: Sorry...

1:06:34.4 Speaker 5: Thank you for joining us today. I'm curious about the nuances of gender in this conversation. So I heard you name two candidates, Garcia and Gallego. I'm curious if gender plays a role in terms of voting and does that shift? I guess it's a two-parter. So the nuances of gender and then does that shift based on the level that you're looking at, whether it be congressional or local to the state to national? 

1:07:02.9 CR: A couple things on gender. You're gonna see all this talk about Latino men underperforming. I'm gonna set that to the side and say that the first thing you should know is that the women in our community lead our community. In most of Latino culture, there is a woman, normally the grandmother or an older mother who runs everything in a household. And they look to her especially to be more politically involved, PTA, all the things. But where that's reciprocated to what people don't talk about when it comes to gender is that there's more elected women Latinos than there are men because they are the organizers. So it's easier for them to get elected... And folks are shocked by that. When it comes to the nonprofit world that I work in a lot, most of the heads of the organizations are again, women. Women of color, mainly Latinas. And so they gravitate up. I'm gonna get to the part to where the boys get jealous of that. But that's just a fact is that the women are more elected and run the organizations.

1:08:11.8 CR: The gender piece on voting is in fact true in every single race that I'm working in. Women, let's say we're here talking about Latinas. Latinas are over-performing Latinos by at least 10 points. Some it's 15, some it's eight, but 10. And there's a lot of reasons for that. One of that is that back to this, it's hard to reach them. Boys seem to not be as smart as girls. They're more distracted. They're watching sports. They could give 2 cents and all the things, while women are got a list and they're figuring all the things out and what they're gonna do tomorrow and does the clothes washed and all the things. That's one piece. Democrats have successfully overperformed expectations. Now, this will be the third cycle because the US Supreme Court took 53 years of rights away from women in a stroke of a pen. And it made women really mad. And it should have, and it's made a lot of men really mad. But we have taken that as a motivational factor for women and for most of all Democrats, and spent a lot of time mobilizing our party to show up because of this thing that was so elementary, which was a right for a woman's body. Her choice and all of those things that go with that.

1:09:34.9 CR: The average age of Latina was 28. Imagine a 21-year-old boy who for six years have only heard Democrats talk to him about one issue and it's about a woman's right. And he probably agrees with that. But as he's matured and got a girlfriend or a boyfriend or got a house or whatever he's done, he's gotten older, but he hasn't heard anything about the cost of bread, gasoline, jobs. When Democrats have done a wonderful job at these things, but not communicating that message, it still means we're winning those men overwhelmingly. Not overwhelming, 55%, 50% when it should be 65%, the baseline. But that's where the slippage comes from, in my opinion as somebody who does this as an expert. And the last thing I'll say about that is, you don't see yourself as a man in the Democratic party in positions of power if you're a black man or a brown man making many of these decisions. So there's a lot of well-intentioned white people and women, even Latinas, who are trying to figure out the best way to reach a non-college educated brown man when there's literally not one in the system to help figure that out except for the one sitting up in the front of the room. And not that they can all hire me, but for those of you live streaming, I'm available for hire if you need to.

[laughter]

1:11:02.6 Speaker 5: Thank you very much.

1:11:05.3 CR: Yes, sir.

1:11:06.3 S5: You said something very interesting that the political decision at this stage is not very cerebral, but it's driven by like, you know what I like? Donald Trump looks to me a lot like a televangelist, Jimmy Swaggart or any of those. A very grotesque character, but has an effective message. And when it comes to immigrants like us, the message that he conveys is that we poison the blood of this country. So it's very dark and very fascist. What is the response to that? And I have one, the message that we enriched the culture of this country. I'm Venezuelan very proud of Miguel Cabrera, very proud of Gustavo Dudamel. I feel we really enriched this country. This country enriched me and my family. What is the response that we're poisoning the blood of the country? And wouldn't the message that we enrich the country be a valid one? Or maybe there's a better one that I still haven't heard. But that is my question. How would he respond to the demagoguery of charlatans like Trump that are poisoning the thinking of this country? 

1:12:13.8 CR: You make an excellent point. You know, and I should have led with this and said that it's very personal for me in my firm and I'll answer the question. I'm not dodging your question. In 14 years of having this firm we have hired, trained and mentored this is me being dramatic over 130 young brown and black kids, majority of them, women of color, majority of them immigrants, including an 18-year-old Venezuelan girl named Eileen Garcia, who was just one of so many young kids who've taught me a lot about cultures I had no idea about. So when my business partner Luis Alcauter, who came here undocumented at 13, got sworn in as a US citizen three weeks ago, it means something to me. When he uses the words that you're talking about, it hurts. And it's disgusting. The aspirational speak that you talked about is something that's very appealing to Latino voters because we are so young and so new to this country, we still aspire to do great things.

1:13:19.1 CR: And we see that we can do things so much more better here than we could have in our home country 'cause there's more opportunity. I am a living example of all the mistakes that I've made in my life. And I get to be on TV tonight, tomorrow night, make money, get paid to come to a university. Like it's unbelievable the opportunity that are here. But there's a reason why he's doing it. And it's not just to win an election. And it's not just because he's a racist and it's not just because of whatever the hateful thing is anybody could say about Donald Trump. I'm a strategist. I try to flip my emotions because I'm a fighter. Get the best of me. And I've been to counseling about it, and I have tried to become a better man because I grew up in a very toxic, I didn't realize it at the time, traumatic being raised by a single mother and fighting grown men and not having good control of my emotions. I would physically fight people and I shouldn't. This is one of these scars on my face are there is, I grew up fighting for the things that I wanted with my hands, but that's not good either.

1:14:18.1 CR: What Donald Trump is trying to do, more so than be a televangelist, which is exactly what you're talking about. And I get it. I grew up in the south and in the Baptist Church. Jimmy Swaggart is a great coalition of what you're trying to say there. Donald Trump and the Republican Party have a problem. And I back up and say this, when I talked about women and I talked about Dobbs, you've seen how Republicans have been all over the place trying to fix this Dobbs decision and their problem with women. By one minute, Donald Trump's for a national abortion ban. The next minute he's not. He sways, he hymns, he hauls because I know what his polling numbers say, which is he's trying not to say something that's going to destroy him with women voters, which is he's the reason that they lost their rights of their own bodies, which is disgusting.

1:15:15.3 CR: Now, as a strategist, you have to figure out how do I get these women back? How do I get these suburban college educated women who live probably with a Republican husband back over here and not thinking about abortion? Well, we should scare the shit out of them and tell them that they're immigrants coming to rape their daughters to take their job and to eat their dogs and cats and scare the living hell out of them. That's what they've been trying to do for a year. And it's not a new thing, it's as old as time. And we both know where that term poison the blood comes from and its originality and the darkness of that.

1:15:55.0 CR: Exactly and the Holocaust. But what they're doing is trying to get white women who they have to have to win this election backed by scaring them. Not all of them, but enough of them. Because right now there's enough of an underperformance based off a historical data with Latino men and black men. Again one point, two points, just little bits because of maturing of these demographics, nothing against black men or Latino men. We should go work harder to get their vote and get the numbers back up. But what's saving the Democrats with that little bit of a loss there is this great gain with college educated voters, mainly women. So these people, though, the white women vote at almost five times the rate that black women, black men or brown men vote at, because it's the younger demographic of each. And it's not because they're black or brown, it's because they're younger and they're just like I was when I was 27 voting was not the thing that was my priority at the time.

1:16:58.1 CR: It had a lot to do with drinking and other things. But I'll digress that for another TED talk. But this is where he's trying to do by this poisoning the dogs and cats. And I take you back to four years ago in the presidential elections, remember the caravans that were coming of all the immigrants that were gonna take over, scare tactic. 'cause they were trying to offset Dobbs. It's an old tired playbook, but it works with enough of just a few folks to actually maybe give them a shot to win. My final thing about what you're saying is that the aspiration of Latino voters, people ask me all the time, "well, how could a Latino vote for a guy that's saying, we're rapist and murderers and we're just bringing drugs and crime." The electorate is changing dramatically.

1:17:48.0 CR: 15 years ago, it was a majority foreign born electorate. Now it's a majority second and third generation electorate. Most of the people that are really immigrants and who are affected and who hate the way that they're being talked about here are not voters. They're not in the polling. They don't have a voice. They have a voice, but they don't have a vote. And so it's much different with a Latino voter than the Latino population and the Latino population. Going back to what we just said is more segmented, multicultural, multi ethnic, and becoming this super complicated Rubik's cube that we have to work really hard to get a message to. This says, we're with you immigrant. You should aspire. We should give you money to start a business. We should help you be every 'cause you're part of the fabric that's made all of us here. And I'll end this with this question, with this part.

1:18:36.5 CR: We should speak as Democrats as immigration, not as a motivating factor of what's your most important issue, pollster for you to show up and vote. Is it the jobs in the economy? Is it the tax? Is it school, education? Like that's the way we ask questions. But that's not the way people talk to each other. And it's not the way we think about immigration, especially Latinos. 'cause we're still so recently connected to that immigrant story. And when I answer the question and try to make politicians understand this, I said, think about old white man, old white woman like my white grandparents. The story of that grandmother or your father who immigrated here from France, Germany, Ireland. We hand these stories down of the immigrant roots of our culture, especially right here in Detroit where they came here for these jobs when they worked in the steel mills there were segmented parts of the steel mills where all the Pollocks worked in one area.

1:19:39.4 CR: All the Irish worked in the blast furnace. It was the nastiest part. 'cause they were the Mexicans of the day back then. All the Italians worked in another place. And it was a cultural thing. Pride in that culture of that immigrant story. We should be talking about this as that journey to what my brother just said about we make this country better because we all have, we've just forgotten to talk about that story in that way. We only know to talk about it in a demagoguery way of these dirty Mexicans that are coming like me bringing drugs and that a brown man is a bad man or a black immigrant from Haitia, that is Haitian is a bad person because of they're going to a community making it better. We should talk about it in an aspirational term, linking it to the population of immigrant stories that have been handed down. And how we lean into that. And how my business partner, who's now a US citizens of now almost three weeks, makes as much money as a US congressman. And that's what the American dream's about. Is that kid having a chance to do that. And he's not a kid. He's 31, but he makes more money than a US congressman now and gets to run campaigns against congressman who don't like him.

1:20:50.8 DO: I mean, it's interesting 'cause Donald Trump's mom was an immigrant and no one ever talks about that. That's not a part of his story of all of his wives.

1:20:57.7 CR: His wife's an anchor baby. But anyway.

1:21:00.4 DO: Bill and Christina have raised this important point too, that I think it's such useful context that we don't talk about enough. That's a couple years ago, last election, we were talking about immigrants as the essential workers that allowed us all to stay safe in a critical moment in our country, in our economy. And now they're the threats and how quickly we can change the language we used to talk about and homogenize a single group. I know we're running low on time. Katrina, do we have another question? I think you had a good question you wanted to ask too.

1:21:27.3 CR: All heck.

1:21:29.9 DO: Sorry.

1:21:29.9 Katrina: Thank you Mara. I guess I'm just curious there's, I think a lot of folks are disillusioned about the bipartisan system and if you have any commentary on where you think the future of a multi party beyond the two party system could extend and how to kind of capture some voters who I think identify a lot of problems with both of the major parties.

1:21:58.0 CR: The two parties aren't going anywhere anytime soon, but I think over time they could all depending... Let me back up and say this. It all determines what happens if Donald Trump wins or loses. I think a lot of this can go back to "some form of commonality." If he gets beat, I think there is a component of that that stays there. But you'll quickly learn that if your name is not Donald Trump and you try to act like Donald Trump, you don't get the same, the press ain't gonna cover you and voters are not gonna react to you in that way. I tell people this all the time that, and I'm on TV across from Republicans all the time and have to debate them. And most of them are pretty good folks. We differ on the ways that certain policies should be the best for the American people. But back in the day before Donald Trump, me and you could argue about what's the best policy that's best for a student or for a teacher. You think it'd be best if we did this thing and I think we'd be best if we do this thing. But what we had in common with these flowers and these flowers and all their rubber beauty.

1:23:09.0 Katrina: I was waiting for you.

1:23:11.9 CR: Were the betterment of the people. I think it's better for everybody to be better, get more money, have better all the things. So does she. But I think the path is here. She thinks the path is here, but we are both focused on the betterment. Today we focus on the differences, not the commonalities. And if you're team blue or team red, you're a racist or you're whatever. If you're Donald Trump. Right? And I've tried not to use those language in here 'cause I don't think everybody that's voting for Donald Trump is a racist.

1:23:40.7 CR: But I think Donald Trump has allowed a small portion of that party to take over all the party, which is rooted in some really ugly things. That's not to say that Democrats are perfect 'cause we are not. And I don't agree with everything the Democrats do. But I've never voted for a Republican, but I disagree with my own party inside. The one thing that I'll say about your question is that's very interesting, is that these new Latinos that we're all talking about that are coming of age, they're not registering as Democrats, but they're not registering as Republicans either. Most new voters in America are registering as no party preference. And they're trying to figure out, because none of us have talked to them, they don't know what they are. They know they're not their mom and daddy. Some of that meaning they're not being a Republican or not being a Democrat.

1:24:29.0 CR: That's the biggest thing. I think over time, when Ross Perot did what he did in the '90's, we all thought, well here comes the third parties. Well that went away because there's not an infrastructure that to support that. And the reason he got to do that is 'cause he was a billionaire. That doesn't mean that somebody like Bloomberg who ran in that 2020 race couldn't do the same thing. And that's possible. Again, no peso, no say so. I also think that that's also what's wrong with our politics is all this money in it. That's a separate TED talk for another day. But I do think that there's hope that things could be happening. And I think as much competition for votes should be out there. If the end result is the betterment of our people, no matter who the people are, all of these flowers, all these have the same vote.

1:25:08.9 CR: This one could be rich, this one could be poor. But we're all flowers. What's the betterment of this? We've only concentrated on these three that are rich while the rest of these over here have been doing all the work and paying all the taxes. Like that's the frustration. You can blame the party. Now people can blame the party, but there's a lot more to that. Like you have to disrupt the system and fix it. That's why it's a democracy and it ain't perfect. It's nowhere near perfect. That's what makes it so beautiful. It allows somebody like me to be here speaking to you, you listening to me? What right do you have to listen to me? All of you have a more education than I got. Most of you could figure out how to open an excel document. I can't figure it out to save my life a lot of times.

1:25:47.1 CR: Like that is funny, but it's also real life. Like only in America does that happen. And I think if we focus more on that, we can get rid of redistricting and putting all the Democrats in one district and all the Republicans where we make it, where we have to talk to each other again. We will have to find more commonality. And it'll be interesting to see how much of the visceralness goes out of our politics if he gets beat or if he wins. Right? And if you ask me today it's a 50/50 shot, anybody could win the presidency. We're probably gonna lose the house. I mean, lose the Senate, but probably win the house. So we're gonna be in divided government. So there's an opportunity there for whoever is there to do that.

1:26:33.3 DO: Well thank you guys for being here. And thank you Chuck for joining us.

[applause]

1:26:43.9 CR: To follow me on social media, please tweet or X at me or let me know what you thought about my talk and that way my staff won't get up to me when I get home. But thank y'all.