Presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is targeting Latino voters by running the same ad in Spanish, but with accents from three different Spanish-speaking locations.
All the ads use the same tagline to contrast him with President Trump: “stories don’t pay the bills,” a pun that means “telling stories won’t pay the bills.”
But, according to the Associated Press, the version of the ad that aired in Miami featured a narrator with a Cuban accent, while in Orlando, the ad had a narrator with a Puerto Rican accent and, in Phoenix, the accent was Mexican. .
Biden hopes to capture once-solidly Republican states like Florida and Arizona by stimulating higher Latino voter turnout than 2016. In Florida, Latinos make up about 20 percent of registered voters.
Latino participation in 2016 fell to 47.6 percent of eligible voters, a decrease of nearly 3 percentage points since 2008, according to US Census surveys.
But a recent CNN analysis found that Hillary Clinton performed better with Latino voters at this point in the presidential race than Biden. In a final pre-election poll, Clinton led Trump with Hispanic voters from 61 to 23 percent. Biden, on an average of eight pre-election polls, has an advantage over Trump by a slimmer margin: 58 percent to 33 percent.
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Biden also lagged behind rival Bernie Sanders in Latino support during the primaries, with the Vermont senator earning victories in Hispanic states like California and Nevada.
The Trump campaign has been using his sizable campaign cash for Latino outreach for more than a year. After Biden launched his Latino outreach program “Everyone with Biden” in October, the Trump campaign controlled him by buying the URL and taking the Twitter ID of the same name.
A visit to www.todosconbiden.com revealed a message in English and Spanish: “Wow, Joe forgot about Latinos. Joe just talks.
Democrats are using new advances in “micro-targeting” to personalize outreach to individual ethnic groups within the Latino community.
“We now have the ability to make sub-ethnic models,” said Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Tom Pérez, whose parents immigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic, in a recent conference call with Biden advisers.
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“If you know someone named Pérez, or Alex or Rodríguez in Florida, and you want them to vote for Joe Biden, one of the most important things you should learn about them is whether they are Rodríguez, Alex or Pérez from Venezuela, from the Dominican Republic, from Cuba, from Puerto Rico? “, said.” De “means” of “in Spanish.
It means “really understanding that we are not a monolith,” said Julie Chávez Rodríguez, granddaughter of civil rights leader César Chávez and senior advisor to the Biden campaign. “It is not about taking a campaign ad in English and translating it into Spanish and considering that Latino reach.”
The Republican Party has also tried to tailor different messages to voters with roots throughout Latin America, especially when it comes to older Cuban-Americans, who tend to be more conservative and fervently anti-communist.
Similar views can be found among some Venezuelans in the United States who fervently oppose the challenged president of that country, Nicolás Maduro. This could be part of the reason why Trump backed down quickly after saying he could meet with Maduro in late June.
“I would only meet with Maduro to discuss one thing: a peaceful departure from power!” later said.
Bertica Cabrera Morris, a member of the Latinos For Trump advisory board, criticized the Democrats’ “micro-targeting” effort and said it might seem patronizing.
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“What they are doing is micro-targeting rather than realizing that we are like the rest of the population,” said Cabrera Morris. “How dare you suggest that my problems are different from yours?”
Associated Press contributed to this report.
