WASHINGTON
(AP) — The Spanish-language ads for Joe Biden used the same slogan to
contrast him with President Donald Trump — “los cuentos no pagan las
cuentas,” a play on words that roughly means “telling stories won’t pay
the bills.”
But
the narrator for the version that aired in Miami had a Cuban accent. In
Orlando, the accent was Puerto Rican. And in Phoenix, it was Mexican.
Biden,
the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, is hoping to capture
Florida and other pivotal states by pushing Latino turnout rates higher
than when Hillary Clinton was defeated in 2016. A key to doing that is a
deeper understanding of Latino voters’ backgrounds thanks to new
advancements in “micro-targeting.”
That
means using data modeling of voter populations to produce ads and
customize outreach aimed at individual ethnic groups within the larger
Latino community.
“We
now have the capacity to do sub-ethnicity modeling,” Democratic
National Committee Chairman Tom Perez, whose parents immigrated to the
U.S. from the Dominican Republic, said on a recent conference call with
Biden advisers.
“If
you meet someone named Perez, or Alex or Rodríguez in Florida — and you
want them to vote for Joe Biden — one of the most important things you
ought to learn about them is, are they Rodríguez, Alex or Perez de
Venezuela, de la Republica Dominicana, de Cuba, de Puerto Rico?” he
said. “De” means “from” in Spanish.
Campaigns
often target voters with individualized messaging. It’s why
presidential candidates stress one theme while trying to woo Midwest
African Americans and another for white, suburban women in the South.
Still,
top Democrats are betting big that subtle tweaks could pay big
dividends. Latino turnout in 2016 fell to 47.6% of eligible voters in
that group, down nearly 3 percentage points from 2008, according to U.S.
Census surveys. Improving that, they argue, could potentially flip
Florida and tighten the race in once steadfastly Republican Arizona.
Biden’s
campaign calls hyper-competitive locales like Florida “1% states,” and
Perez points to the Democratic Party now being able to micro-target by
sub-ethnicity as why the party can be more successful with Latinos than
in 2016.
It
means “really understanding that we’re not a monolith,” said Julie
Chávez Rodríguez, the granddaughter of civil rights leader Cesar Chávez
and a senior adviser to Biden’s campaign. “It’s not about taking an
English campaign ad and translating it into Spanish and considering that
Latino outreach.”
Biden has ground to make up
after strong Latino support lifted rival Bernie Sanders to Democratic
primary victories in California and Nevada. Rodríguez said Biden has
since hired more Hispanics throughout every level of his campaign, while
ensuring they are from different backgrounds. That allows for reaching
voters using different cultural nuances and forms of Spanish, which can
vary greatly by country.
It may yet be a tall order. Trump has used his sizable campaign cash advantage
over Biden to bolster his reelection campaign’s Latino outreach for
more than a year. The Republican Party, meanwhile, has also sought to tailor different messages to voters with roots throughout Latin America. A natural fit are older Cuban Americans, who tend to be more conservative and fervently anti-communist.
Similar
views can be found among some Venezuelans in the U.S. who ardently
oppose that country’s president, Nicolás Maduro. That was part of the
reason why Trump, who recently faced backlash after suggesting he might
meet with Maduro, quickly backtracked.
Bertica
Cabrera Morris, a Latinos For Trump advisory board member, said
Democrats’ relying too heavily sub-ethnicity modeling could seem
patronizing.
“What
they’re doing is micro-targeting instead of realizing we’re just like
the rest of the population,” Cabrera Morris said. “How dare you suggest
my problems are different from yours?”
Andrea
Mercado, executive director of the voter mobilization organization New
Florida Majority, said that when it comes to campaigns better
understanding Latinos, “any advance is welcome” but that simply offering
ads modified for different audiences isn’t enough.
“We’re looking for the necessary investments to persuade and mobilize Latinos at all levels of elected office,” Mercado said.
Still,
individualized messaging may prove especially vital in Florida, which
has a deeply diverse Latino population encompassing people with roots in
Cuba, the Dominican Republic, as well as Venezuela and other South
American countries, and Nicaragua and throughout Central America. It has
more than 3 million eligible Latino voters, about 20% of total eligible
voters statewide.
Democratic
consultant Colin Rogero recalls once producing two versions of a Miami
political ad featuring a grandmother talking kitchen table issues that
were identical except what she cooked. For Cuban neighborhoods it was
black beans and rice. For Puerto Rican areas it was red beans and rice.
“You’re not going to deliver a tortilla ad to Cubans in South Florida,” Rogero said. “They’ll go, ‘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
swelled following Hurricane Maria’s devastation in 2017, said executive
director Juan Peñalosa. The party used that to send out a mailer
featuring a photo of Trump jokingly tossing rolls of paper towels to
Puerto Ricans at an aid center after the storm.
Peñalosa
said party staffers and volunteers have created customized talking
points to reach different Latino communities, such as Biden opposing
Maduro. Those can be used while conducting phone banks, which, along
with texting and digital efforts, have become more vial as the
coronavirus outbreak has virtually suspended in-person campaigning.
In
places like Texas and California, Latino populations are mostly Mexican
American. Still, targeted messaging can be used to better connect with
pockets of Latinos in states that aren’t traditionally known for having
many of them: Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in Pennsylvania, as well as
Latinos of many backgrounds in Milwaukee’s suburbs.
Lorella
Praeli, Clinton’s 2016 director of Latino outreach, said Latinos were
long viewed as natural Democratic-leaning voters who simply needed to be
mobilized. That often meant waiting until too late before the election
to launch simple “get out the vote” initiatives, rather than organizing
long- term, more expensive efforts to ensure voters have personal stakes
in voting.
“It
is absolutely an improvement and it is part of an evolution of really
working to get it right,” Praeli, now president Community Change Action,
said of sub-ethnicity modeling. “What you do with the data is how you
get it right.”
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