Republicans looking for gains with Latinos have lots of catching up to do on TV

Spending on Spanish-language media is poised to set records this midterm election, as Latino voters play an outsize role in the battlegrounds that will determine control of Congress later this year.

Republican candidates and outside groups are still playing catch-up in terms of total spending and the number of places where they are investing in Spanish ads. AdImpact, the ad-tracking service, has cataloged more than $54 million in Democratic spending on Spanish-language TV and radio ads since the start of 2021, compared to $19 million for Republicans. If future Spanish-language bookings hold, GOP candidates and groups will spend at least $30 million on Hispanic media, far surpassing the $22 million total they spent during the 2020 cycle, according to AdImpact — but still trailing what Democrats have already spent.

The spending is part of a surge in attention from both parties to Hispanic and Latino voters, a group that has largely favored Democrats for decades but moved toward the GOP in some parts of the country in 2020. The demographic became the second-largest voting bloc in the United States this year — and while about 10 percent of adult American citizens speak Spanish, according to Census estimates, that share is higher in Arizona, Nevada and other states and districts at the center of the fight for Congress.

A Washington Post/Ipsos poll released Friday found Hispanic voters still favor Democrats overall, but the gap between the two parties has narrowed since 2018, while significant differences remain among Hispanic and Latino voters based on factors such as age and religion.

“From doing this for 32 years, I’ve never seen more races in play to control Congress and the Senate where Latinos now have a large population that will over-index the outcome,” said Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha, who frequently coordinates with firms to create Latino-oriented advertising. “The decision to make a Spanish-language ad is now being driven by the concentration of our population and some of the most important and critical races.”

Spanish-language advertising still accounts for a tiny share of overall political spending on TV and radio — around 2.5 percent overall for Democrats and 1 percent for Republicans since the start of 2021, AdImpact data show.

Since Labor Day, candidates and outside groups have released Spanish-language TV or radio ads in more than two dozen House districts along with each of the most competitive Senate races.

The key topics are familiar: Inflation, jobs and the economy have consistently polled as some of the top issues that Latinos care about, even as newer topics like gun control and abortion have entered the fray in recent months. Democrats’ Spanish-language ads most frequently hammer on jobs and the economy followed by abortion, while crime is the most common topic from Republicans.

The themes are often similar across languages in a given campaign. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) has run ads on the issue of abortion in both English and Spanish, releasing a Spanish-language spot emphasizing the risk to women with pregnancy complications and victims of sexual assault and an English-language one that features a female doctor saying women need to be able to make their own decisions.

Two September ads from Sen. Mark Kelly’s (D-Ariz.) campaign show the nuances of making similar ads targeted across demographics. Both focus on quotes from Republican Blake Masters, framed around the idea that the candidate’s words matter. But the English version shows clips of Masters bashing U.S. military leadership, denying women’s pay inequities and proposing privatizing Social Security, while the Spanish version highlights and translates his comments criticizing legal immigration and paths to citizenship.

Most Spanish Senate ads airing since Labor Day have been unique, meaning they were not dubbed from an existing English spot. But on the House side, more than two-thirds were originally in English and dubbed with a direct Spanish counterpart.

Most House broadcast ads in Spanish also started airing later in the year, while some Senate campaigns have been broadcasting bilingual ads since the spring.

Senate candidates and committees have more resources to spend and have been working with more Latino senior operatives, Latino consultants told POLITICO, while more white-majority firms are involved in the smaller races seeing more dubbing of English ads.

The “one-size-fits-all” approach some campaigns use to dub their English ads won’t work across states with different Latino subcultures, from subject matter to regional dialects of choice, they added.

“You can increase the spending and you can increase the outreach, but if the message is not resonating with folks … that’s not the correct messenger,” said Gabriela Cid, a Spanish language messaging adviser at Equis Research, a progressive Latino-focused firm. “It’s important to involve people that understand the Latino community, people that can speak Spanish and can cater to our people.”

And Rocha added that the more carefully planned Spanish-language advertising in several states is helping candidates up and down the Democratic ticket.

“In Nevada and Pennsylvania, Democratic congressional candidates are doing better there with Latinos because the Senate is carrying the water,” Rocha said. “In states like Texas, New Mexico or California where there’s not a Senate race, and there’s not been a ton of statewide Spanish TV, you see the congressional candidates lagging because there’s been no communication to the community.”

The lack of broad, consistent Spanish advertising may have an effect on Spanish-dominant voters, though they make up less than a fifth of the wider Hispanic electorate.

Almost 40 percent of Latinos can’t say which party cares more about them, according to a September recommendations report from Equis — and that effect is more pronounced among Spanish-dominant speakers. Slightly lower proportions are still undecided on which candidate they’ll support in Pennsylvania, Texas and North Carolina, the report found.

Spanish-dominant voters have also expressed less motivation to cast a ballot than English-dominant ones, though they are still more likely to support Democratic candidates, according to one UnidosUS July poll. The smaller Spanish-dominant portion of the Latino electorate still makes up a noteworthy percentage in states where both Republicans and Democrats aim to gain ground, like Arizona and Texas. And engaging Spanish-dominant voters means looping in people eager to be involved in the democratic process, Cid said.

Democrats have generally outspent Republicans on Spanish-language media in past election cycles, although Republicans made gains in some areas led by South Florida and South Texas. While a majority of Latino voters still favor Democrats in 2020 and in recent polling, the movement was enough to convince some Republican groups that had not previously invested in Hispanic outreach to do so for the first time.

Club for Growth Action launched a major Spanish-language ad buy in Nevada last week, targeting Cortez Masto — the country’s first Latina senator — on the issue of crime, echoing similar attacks from other Republican groups both in Nevada and other major Senate races. The incumbent Democrat “praised radicals associated with ‘defund the police,’” the ad notes in Spanish, with the phrase “defund the police” still in English. The group plans to address inflation in a second Spanish-language ad, Club for Growth president David McIntosh told POLITICO, and will spend a total of around $2.5 million by Election Day.

It was the super PAC’s first Spanish-language ad buy. Club for Growth’s 501(c)(4) nonprofit arm first ran ads in Spanish earlier this year focused on the Supreme Court, criticizing Biden’s promise to nominate a Black woman to the highest judgeship, highlighting qualified Hispanic judges and accusing the president of “radical racial politics.”

“I looked at the last election and the Supreme Court nomination that Biden made. Democrats basically sent a signal to Latinos that they were a stepchild in the Democratic coalition and that Biden was only going to promote Black people into office,” McIntosh said. “That gave me the idea of, ‘Let’s check and see if Latino voters are open to moving into the Republican coalition.’”

Even with the PAC’s large buy, Democrats still have a spending advantage on Spanish-language media in Nevada, having spent nearly $8 million on the Senate race there since the start of this year compared to $1.7 million for Republicans. Democrats have similarly put forward more resources in other races, including spending more than $200,000 on Spanish-language radio ads in Pennsylvania to boost John Fetterman.

The exception: Florida, where Republican Sen. Marco Rubio has far outspent his Democratic challenger Val Demings on Spanish-language media.

Though efforts across the country this year have been stronger and earlier than previous cycles, Equis Research’s Cid said, only the results will show whether Spanish-language advertising has paid off with Latino voters.

“I do think there is always going to be a need to do more, and it’s not enough yet,” she said. “This can be a learning lesson for the next cycle… We won’t know until Election Day if those efforts manifest in a way that we’ll be happy with.”