Exploring Voting Behavior and Civic Engagement with Mindy Romero

Episode Notes

Transcript

Mitch Winick:

SideBar podcast wants to thank Legal Talk Network for serving as our platform for these past two and a half seasons. LTN has been a great partner. Effective August 5th SideBar is transitioning to our own website at SideBar media.org. In addition to the player located on our website, you can listen and follow on Podbean Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, as well as on most other podcast platforms. Join us on SideBar media.org.

Mindy Romero:

This isn’t about any particular person who’s in power now, but we do recognize that this may be the moment in time as we all agree that our democracy is in a weakened state, that maybe more people will come together that wouldn’t have come together historically before, and that they recognize that in this crisis there’s a moment of opportunity.

Announcer:

That’s today’s guest on SideBar. Mindy Romero, the founder and director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy, SideBar, is brought to you by Monterey College of Law, San Luis Obispo College of Law, Kern County College of Law, empire College of Law, located in Santa Rosa and the colleges of Law with campuses in Santa Barbara and Ventura. Welcome to SideBar featuring conversations about optimism in action with lawyers and leaders inspiring change. And now your co-hosts Jackie Gardina and Mitch Winick.

Mitch Winick:

Jackie, I’m very pleased to have Mindy Romero with us today as a guest on SideBar, Mindy is the founder and director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy at the University of Southern California, Saul Price School of Public Policy. One of the things we’ve been doing this season is talking to individuals who are leaders within their communities, within the profession, within academia who have stepped out on their own to do things that are creating positive change. That’s why we’ve called this optimism and action this season, and Mindy certainly fills that role having dedicated her profession to issues related to inclusive democracy. Mindy, welcome to SideBar.

Mindy Romero:

Thank you for having me.

Jackie Gardina:

Mitch and I have spent a lot of time talking about our nation’s attempt to move forward towards a pluralistic democracy and certainly the work that you do Center for Inclusive Democracy is a big part of the forward movement that the nation’s trying to make. I guess my first question is what prompted you to get involved in this? It really originated from when you were a kid. What was it about being a kid and observing what was going on that prompted you to think I’m interested in politics?

Mindy Romero:

Well, I might’ve been a little unusual in terms of kids. I think a common thread with children is a sense of fairness. You learn what’s right and wrong, but you just have this kind of gut sense of that’s not fair. Why is that happening? You question those sorts of things, and when I was a child, I lived in a community where I saw a lot of things happening that didn’t really make sense to me. That didn’t really seem fair. I saw what we think of typically as a more disadvantaged community. Schools not performing as well, parks not in good shape, a lot of things that are really local level. And then I would go not very far, travel very, very small distances and I would see a very different set of experiences and in the same town, different life chances. I didn’t know that term at the time.

I wondered why that was. The case didn’t seem quite right. I heard about our democracy and all the wonderful things around it. I did pay attention to the news and things like that, and it just seemed to be this disconnect. I didn’t understand how politics worked. I didn’t understand how the city council, for instance, the board of supervisors worked, but that was the spark for me. And then as I got older, I learned that the communities that seemed to need even louder voices, they needed more help, more attention were the ones actually that were participating less than other communities in terms of voter turnout rates. But if you go to the city council, right, you’re not going to see that representation, and I wondered why that was the case and then eventually decided I was going to get involved.

Mitch Winick:

Mindy, I can see where that engaged you at a very early age. When you talk about empowering local communities to address disparity, help us understand what that means in common terms.

Mindy Romero:

It’s all about outcomes. We fight over the distribution of outcomes policy generate the life chances that individuals and communities have and in a robust, stable, participatory democracy, representative democracy, you need the people to say, have a very, hopefully very big say in what those policies are and that the outcomes are about improving their lives, but hopefully in a healthy, respectful way. And there are going to be winners and losers, and I didn’t expect to go all the way for my PhD and to be a researcher because no child grows up. Almost no child grows up to think they’re going to be a researcher, but I knew I wanted to play a role, I wanted to learn more, and then I wanted to play a role in making our democracy what it was supposed to be. And then as I got to school and I studied political science and sociology, I realized that maybe I had a little bit of a talent. People told me at least for research, and I thought that could be my pathway.

Mitch Winick:

You went a lot further than that. You’ve now created not one, but two organizations in your current organization collected an impressive group of sponsors of both state agencies and other organizations. Talk about that transition. Now, that’s a much bigger leap than even deciding, well, maybe I’ll get a PhD and study this.

Mindy Romero:

For me, it really wasn’t. If I look back, I mean it was all about the work having impact. Why go and get my PhD and it was a long journey. I ended up doing it as a single mom. I had three kids. You’ve got to be committed, and for me, it was about what I was going to do with that, that I was going to make positive change with that research. It was just how I quickly, very early on, saw a gap in the field in terms of research, specifically looking at these questions of inequity and how to increase participation and representation, and I thought, oh, well, I’ve got to do something about this. Did I think that I would build a center that would now be 15 plus years in and now be a national center? I didn’t have that ability to see that far into the future, but I think if you follow your path, this is what I tell students, if you have your North star, my North Star was use the research, do the work, but it has to be impactful to the real world, nonpartisan. That’s actually the strength of the work because it speaks to everybody and they trust it, and it took me down a path that fortunately has been really impactful with a lot of people’s help.

Mitch Winick:

Your work is centered in a number of really groundbreaking studies. The first one you did in 2012 disparities in California’s vote by mail use, changing demographic composition over a 10 year period, and then a more recent one in 2016, mapping California’s politically vulnerable communities. Okay, you have the data, you did the research, you converted it to reports and statistics, and yet I suspect you find yourself up against individuals who are making policy statements about this type of voter access that have no facts, that in fact are contrary to the facts, contrary to what we even see going on. Talk about that struggle you must have when you’re presenting in front of Senate committees and yet others are saying things that you just know for a fact are not true.

Mindy Romero:

I will say that that disconnect has probably always been there. I suspect you’re referring to the misinformation, disinformation, the lack of agreement on what are facts and for instance, the national call that we’ve seen to say that there’s fraud with vote by mail to say that we have widespread fraud in the voting process, there’s just absolutely no evidence to show that there’s any significant fraud happening in study after study after study after study. Right, but that being said, when we talk about policymaking surprised me how much policy is made with not very much fact, and it’s probably been that way for a very long time, but there’s a lot of policies made by people’s intuition or what they feel they know is happening in their communities. Getting the data and the research in front of them can be really challenging, so you’ve got to make it accessible. You’ve got to do the two pager that the staff member will look at first and not have bias able to be a trusted source. Our research as well as others have been a critical part in those conversations. Number of bills I can point to that have cited our work and others.

Jackie Gardina:

To follow up a little bit more on this idea of nonpartisan, and you just seem to speak to it right there, where your center doesn’t take a position on a particular bill as either good or bad. What you try to do is present the evidence, the research, the data so that policymakers can make informed decisions about how they’re going to vote, and maybe this is, again, being jaded by today’s political environment. It seems hard to walk that nonpartisan line because if data comes back not supporting or in fact contradicting a particular bill or outcome or position, your center would be seen as partisan because what the research is showing, how is it that you talk about that without necessarily implicating that you’re partisan in some way when it’s just perceived that way?

Mindy Romero:

First off, you don’t cower from it. You’re careful in the sense that you don’t want to say something that you don’t mean that could be misinterpreted, so you have to be measured and careful. The first thing I say is we’re in a nonpartisan research center. What I’m going to tell you today is presenting the research to you. I’m here just to inform your conversation. It’s really, really important to start off the conversation that way.

Mitch Winick:

Mindy, it’s one thing working with congressional staffers or senate staffers, it’s another thing dealing with the media who are frequently looking for a specific angle. How do you deal with that?

Mindy Romero:

People that are fearful of media, they shouldn’t be. They’re important part of communication, obviously, but I do get a lot of questions about the political ramification. If one particular election bill or election reform is going to help one party or another, and I just say what the research says, and I don’t go beyond the research.

Mitch Winick:

Mindy, talk about some of the work you’re doing regarding the Latino vote that seems to be one of the hot topics in politics today. Tell us a little about what your research is showing there and why that has become such a vocal point of the federal elections right now.

Mindy Romero:

There’s the big long term picture and then there’s what everybody wants to talk about is was there a shift in the Latino vote that impacted the election? And let’s be honest, people want to talk about that because of usually how they feel about the outcome of the election. So much of our conversation is on the election cycle and around whether it actually benefits a party or not, and we’re not thinking about actual representation and voice. Over the years, I’ve talked a lot about historic disparities and participation, and of course Latinos are the largest population in the United States with the greatest disparity or gap in turnout and participation versus the general population. Exit polls historically have not been very accurate for Latinos. There definitely was a shift, and I think it only benefits everyone to acknowledge that shift. That being said, a lot of the conversation has been overstated. There has been a change in recent years and in 2024, but it’s very small.

Mitch Winick:

Jackie, I want to take a moment to reflect that as we’re talking about optimism and action. Many of our guests say that they first started thinking about a career in public service while they were still in law school, and schools like yours and mine, Monterey College of Law provide an affordable, convenient way for working adults to attend law school and pursue these interests. Classes are taught by practicing lawyers and judges who prepare our students to serve their community in many of the same areas that we are discussing here on SideBar. For more information, go to monterey law.edu.

Jackie Gardina:

You’ve done a significant amount of work in both civic education and in empowering youth to get out and get involved in our democracies. Can you speak a little bit to the work that you’ve done, the curriculum that you’ve built and what you hope to do with that?

Mindy Romero:

Number one, we’ve just done research that has broken out the youth vote so many people hadn’t done and just talking about what those numbers are, how low they are, the big gap between 18 to 24 year olds and people that are over 65 in turnout depending on the election, it’s 20, 30, 40 percentage points difference. Again, in that story though, to talk about the barriers for young people, because we really want to blame young people who don’t participate. We say these apathetic youth, what’s wrong with them? These kids today, they like to blame them, but they actually are okay with it because well, they don’t want young people voting and for issues like taxes and that kind of thing, just illuminating the numbers is really important. Talking about the barriers, we’ve really tried to get it out and about, like I did a TEDx talk on the power of the youth vote. We’ve talked to classrooms with young people. We’ve helped develop curriculum, civic engagement curriculum. This is where we’re not advocates, but we’re educators, and that’s an important distinction. So we take the research and we talk to people about it, and we push back on some of the myths or misunderstandings about young people and their participation, and we try to encourage young people themselves. That’s the bottom line with our work, hopefully empowering them because the most important motivator for young people to participate is peer-to-peer contact to give them the data and the information.

Mitch Winick:

Your approach at the moment is to create curriculum for schools. That’s a very valuable initiative, but how do we get it beyond that? If we want to get youth involved and active in the democratic process, what are some of the other things we should be doing?

Mindy Romero:

Well, to be honest, we need to get ourselves involved too, but we’re not doing enough to support young people. Again, most of the conversation is why they’re not doing it, and we need to really understand how the system and our structures really aren’t supporting young people. There’s lots of great civic education work that’s happening. It’s not distributed across communities. Yes, we need to do more with kids and we create a larger culture. This is the very hard part, but if we want to robust, fully participatory, stable and enduring, enduring democracy, then we need to have a culture that really supports that, and I will say that I argue that we’re not going to get there unless also the outcomes are ones of our democracy, those policy outcomes, right? Those everyday nuts and bolts, unless people perceive them, they perceive our democracy and our government as actually producing outcomes that are really in their best interests, and that I think is a big part of our overall instability.

Now, many Americans feel disconnected from their government. Many levels of trust, of course, are very low. People struggle to see why their government is actually working or is it working in their best interest. This has actually been the case for a long time. We’re just now kind of paying a little bit more attention to it. While we basically believe Americans in democracy when it comes to democratic norms, we often will not expect adherence to them, at least if it’s our person in power, and by the way, this is whether you’re red or blue, and we’re also participating in low numbers. There’s lots of people that protest and do amazing things in this country on lots of different topics, but if you look at the overall proportions, it’s still proportionately participation. Civic and political is low, and I argue that’s because there are real barriers to participation for many people, but also many people feel very disconnected, and it’s like, why should I not?

Because they don’t care. They care about their communities. They want change. They want better outcomes, so I think getting real about that is really important, and we can’t just talk about our kids. We have to examine ourselves. We have to examine our larger structures and on a positive direction. That’s actually something that I am working on right now. It goes beyond my center. It’s the long game fundamental change, re-imagining our democracy, getting us to a place that we want to all participate in our democracy, and we feel that we have a real chance to have a say and to have our needs met.

Jackie Gardina:

Wow, Minnie, there’s so much in there. I’m not sure where to go, but I think the place to go is that really hopeful place that you started talking about, which is you are working on something to help bring that culture of participation and engagement back. I’d love to hear about that.

Mindy Romero:

Right now we’re saying it’s a proposal. It’s something that we’re working on and we eventually we’ll take everybody. It’s called by the people. For the people. It’s an initiative to reimagine our democracy. It’s not a rah rah, do this for your civic duty. It’s roughly five years, although it’ll be enduring beyond that. The first three years are about rebuilding American’s capacity for engagement on the large scale, so it’s about rebuilding our democratic norms and how government functions. It’s a basic civics campaign, respectfully, not in a condescending way that will occur across states, so for three years, state coalitions will be built grassroots from the states. They will come together. A broad spectrum of civil society groups all nonpartisan, but some will lean left, some will lean right, but they all agree strict rules. They’re working together to engage in a public civics campaign and that this has always been needed.

This isn’t about any particular person who’s in power now, but we do recognize that this may be the moment in time as we all agree that our democracy is in a weakened state, that maybe more people will come together that wouldn’t have come together historically before, and that they recognize that in this crisis there’s a moment of opportunity, so people will come together, they’ll work together to conduct these public civics campaigns, and while they’re doing that, they’re also building a network. It’ll culminate in a national people’s assembly or civic assembly state coalitions to come together. They decide on the selection process for the delegate to the National Assembly, so it’s all people driven. They decide how long figure about a year or so. They have one charge, and it is to figure out where we should be going as a democracy and their North Star is that whatever reforms they suggest they have to produce outcomes that are in the best interest of the people, really important, and so they end up creating after a year or so, a democracy roadmap of institutional reforms, not just election reforms.

We’re encouraging them to think big, to think interconnected, comprehensive, so public, private, legislative, regulatory, national, state and local reforms, this interwoven interdisciplinary cross sector. Once they release this, it’ll be draft form and then the draft goes back out to the American public whole big campaign. I’m skipping a lot of details here, but it also gets taken back by all these state campaigns. That draft gets disseminated through those communications channels that they created for the public civics campaigns. That’s all sorts of ways that we’re going to get the public’s input on the draft. Eventually, the draft gets finalized, it gets disseminated back out for the adoption process and education process, and there’ll be very large campaign just explaining every step of the way, really transparent about the motives, about the purpose that it’s people driven. We’re excited because of the scope of it. It is absolutely huge as you can imagine.

We hope that we get to the point to be able to launch it, and the idea is that you have something enduring. There’s accountability every year. There’s tracking of which reforms get adopted and which don’t. It’s people driven and you have a built-in network and a whole lot of trusted messengers and respected community members that will build in that legitimacy over time in the transparency and in service to the American people. I don’t know about you, but I think everybody knows that there’s reforms that we need. We’ve needed for a very long time. I have faith in the American people even in the current state. My faith is in the American people getting us to a democracy where we trust each other.

Jackie Gardina:

Your enthusiasm and obvious optimism for the project gives me hope, and I’m wondering, and perhaps you answered this, but what gets you up every day and thinks I could make a difference doing this?

Mindy Romero:

I think when I was younger, I didn’t actually think that I could make a difference necessarily or that I was the best person to do it or the one people would listen to the most. I think this is really important. I tell this to students a lot now and others that I work with. You don’t have to be the best. You just have to care and you just have to believe at least that you should open your mouth, that back it up with correct information and sincerity and be forthright and be honest and transparent in what you’re doing, but you don’t have to be the biggest voice or the best voice or the smartest voice. You just have to care and want to make a difference.

Mitch Winick:

Mindy, that’s a great message on which to end. This episode. It reflects both optimism and action as well as a call to action. I look forward to participating in this national discussion about democracy and the rights of the people count me in.

Jackie Gardina:

Mindy, thank you so much. I always know it’s going to be a good episode when I leave feeling hopeful, and so thank you for giving me that hope. I really enjoyed speaking with you today. Thanks for

Mindy Romero:

Having me,

Jackie Gardina:

Mitch. I think what was really hopeful for me in that conversation was that pivot back to by the people for the people, and I know in my head it was hard for me not to say, but we’re in a information ecosystem that is disaggregated, that we’ve got Citizens United and big money in politics, but she was so excited and so enthusiastic about this idea of having the people build the reforms for democracy that it was hard for me not to feel as excited as she was about it, so I’m really looking forward to that push that she is moving towards because I think it’s really something culturally that we need to sustain our democracy.

Mitch Winick:

We tend to get distracted, particularly by the dysfunction of Congress, for example, right now, where they cannot seem to get any bipartisan efforts through, and yet Mindy reminds us that that’s really a cop out to say, well, things are bad because Congress can’t make decisions. She brings it right back home and says, the burden is ours. This is our democracy. This is our country. We believe passionately about it. We believe in it for ourselves and for our children, and that she has an idea about how we can bring, as she said, we the people back into control of this process. I found that amazingly positive and optimistic. It was just heartwarming and meaningful to hear her talk about that with such enthusiasm.

As we said at the beginning of this episode, SideBar podcast wants to thank Legal Talk Network for serving as our platform for these past two and a half seasons. LTN has been a great partner. As SideBar developed its format, content, and approach to issues. We’re very excited to announce that effective August 5th SideBar is transitioning to our own website at SideBar media.org. At SideBar media.org. You can also read our bimonthly blog and access our guests books and articles. In addition to the Player located on our website, you can listen and follow on Podbean Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, as well as on most other podcast platforms. Join us on SideBar media.org.

Jackie Gardina:

Once again, I want to thank everyone who joined us today on SideBar and as always, Mitch and I would love to know what’s on your mind. You can reach us at SideBar media.org.

Mitch Winick:

SideBar would not be possible without our producer, David Eakin, who composes and plays all of the music you hear on SideBar. Thank you also to Dina Dowsett who creates and coordinates sidebar’s. Social media marketing.

Jackie Gardina:

Colleges of law and Monterey College of Law are part of a larger organization called California Accredited Law Schools. All of our schools are dedicated to providing access and opportunity to legal education to marginalized communities.

Mitch Winick:

For more information about the California accredited Law schools, go to ca law schools.org. That’s ca law schools.org.