The Spanish ads for Joe Biden used the same tagline to contrast him with President Trump: “Tales do not pay the bills” a pun that means more or less: “Telling stories won’t pay the bills.”
But the narrator of the version of the ad that aired in Miami had a Cuban accent. In Orlando, Florida, the accent was Puerto Rican. In Phoenix, he was Mexican.
Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, hopes to capture Florida and other key states by pushing Latino participation rates higher than when Hillary Clinton was defeated in 2016. A key to achieving this is a deeper understanding of the background of Latino voters thanks to new developments. in “micro-targeting”.
That means using data modeling of voter populations to produce ads and personalize outreach to individual ethnic groups within the larger 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’s advisers.
“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 Delaware Venezuela, of the Dominican Republic, Delaware Cuba, Delaware Puerto Rico? “He said.”Delaware“Means” of “in Spanish.
Campaigns often target voters with individualized messages. That’s why presidential candidates emphasize one issue in trying to attract black voters in the Midwest and another for white women in the southern suburbs.
Still, top Democrats are betting that subtle adjustments could pay big dividends. Latino participation in 2016 fell to 47.6% of eligible voters in that group, a decrease of nearly three percentage points since 2008, according to US Census polls argue that improving that could potentially turn a corner. Florida and tighten the race in Arizona, which was once Republican.
Biden’s campaign calls hypercompetitive places like Florida “1% of states,” and Pérez points out that the Democratic Party may now be micro-targeted by sub-ethnicity as the reason the party may be more successful with Latinos. than in 2016.
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.”
Biden has to bounce back after strong Latino support led rival Bernie Sanders to Democratic primary victories in California and Nevada. Rodríguez said Biden had hired more Latinos at all levels of his campaign, while making sure they were from different backgrounds. This allows voters to be reached using different cultural nuances and forms of Spanish, which can vary greatly by country.
It can still be a difficult task. Trump has used his sizable campaign cash advantage over Biden to bolster the Latino reach of his reelection campaign for more than a year. The Republican Party has tried to tailor different messages to voters with roots throughout Latin America. A natural fit is 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 President Nicolás Maduro. That was part of the reason why Trump, who recently faced a backlash after suggesting he could meet with Maduro, quickly backed down on the idea.
Bertica Cabrera Morris, a member of the Latino advisory board for Trump, said the strong Democratic reliance on sub-ethnic modeling might seem patronizing.
“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?”
Andrea Mercado, executive director of the New Florida Majority voter mobilization organization, said that when it came to campaigns to better understand Latinos “any progress is welcome,” but simply offering modified ads to different audiences was not enough.
“We are seeking the necessary investments to persuade and mobilize Latinos at all levels of elected office,” Mercado said.
Still, individualized messages can be especially vital in Florida, which has a deeply diverse Latino population that encompasses people with roots in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, as well as in Venezuela and other South American countries, Nicaragua, and throughout Central America. Florida has more than 3 million eligible Latino voters, approximately 20% of the total eligible voters statewide.
Democratic consultancy Colin Rogero recalls that she once produced two versions of a Miami political ad with a grandmother talking about kitchen table topics that were identical, except what she cooked. For Cuban neighborhoods, they were black beans and rice. For Puerto Rican areas, they were red beans and rice.
“You are not going to deliver an omelette ad to Cubans in South Florida,” said Rogero. “They will say, ‘What the hell is this?'”
The Florida Democratic Party has completed a model of unregistered Puerto Ricans who have moved to the state in recent years and whose numbers have increased after the devastation of Hurricane Maria in 2017, Executive Director Juan Peñalosa said. The party used that to send a banner ad featuring a photo of Trump jokingly throwing rolls of paper towels at Puerto Ricans at a post-storm relief center.
Peñalosa said party employees and volunteers had created personalized talking points to reach different Latino communities, such as Biden opposing Maduro. Those can be used while running phone banks, which, along with text messaging and digital efforts, have become more vital as the coronavirus outbreak has virtually halted in-person campaigns.
In places like Texas and California, Latino populations are primarily Mexican American. Still, targeted messaging can be used to better connect with Latino groups in states that are not traditionally known for having many of them: Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in Pennsylvania, as well as Latinos from many origins in suburban Milwaukee.
Lorella Praeli, Clinton’s 2016 Latino outreach director, said Latinos have long been viewed as natural Democrats with a tendency to simply mobilize. That often meant waiting too late before an election to launch simple “get out of the vote” initiatives, rather than organizing long-term and more costly efforts to ensure voters have a vested interest in the vote.
“It is absolutely an improvement, and it is part of an evolution of really working to get it right,” said Praeli, president of Community Change Action, about sub-ethnic models. “What you do with the data is how you do it correctly.”
