Biden releases Spanish-language ads in Florida as Democrats ramp up Hispanic outreach
Joe Biden’s presidential campaign is launching a five-week, bilingual ad blitz across battleground states that President Donald Trump won in 2016, marking the first time Spanish-language commercials backing the presumptive Democratic nominee will air on TV in the Sunshine State.
The former vice president’s campaign announced Thursday that it will spend $15 million to run English- and Spanish-language ads in print, online, and on radio and TV in Florida and five other states. The English-language ads feature snippets of a recent Biden speech in Philadelphia touching on the middle class, coronavirus pandemic and race.
“Right from the get-go, we’re establishing a presence in the Tampa, Orlando, and Jacksonville markets,” Patrick Bonsignore, the director of paid media for the Biden campaign, wrote in a Wednesday memo obtained by the Miami Herald. “We will establish a strong presence in the Panhandle to get in front of white working-class voters who moved from Obama in ‘12 to Trump in ‘16 as well as open a conversation with the African American voters in the Panhandle who will be crucial to mobilize early, and often.”
The campaign is also spending six figures in Florida and elsewhere to run ads focusing on African-American voters starting Friday, June 19, a date commemorating the end of slavery in the U.S.
The Spanish-language ads feature a narrator who champions Biden as an advocate for blue collar families and focuses on Trump’s handling of the pandemic — an issue that Hispanic voters believe disproportionately affects their health and income. The ads are among the first signs that the campaign is developing a broader strategic media campaign aimed at winning over Hispanic voters in Florida and other swing states.
In his memo Wednesday, Bonsignore wrote that the campaign “will have a presence on Miami Spanish-language TV as well as the Orlando and Tampa markets,” and also noted the diversity of the Hispanic and Latino communities across the country.
“We’ve recorded the spot [with] different narrators depending on the region — of Mexican descent in the Phoenix market, Cuban descent for Miami, and a narrator of Puerto Rican descent for Orlando,” he wrote.
The campaign, which created the ads with an in-house producer, will spend $1 million to run the commercials in Florida and Arizona, according to the New York Times, which first reported on the memo. The media campaign focused on Latinos also includes English-language commercials.
Some Democratic politicians and strategists have warned in recent weeks that the Democratic nominee’s campaign is at risk of waiting too long to craft a message aimed toward Hispanic voters in a state where Puerto Ricans and other Latino voters have proven to be a key swing demographic in statewide races. In a press release Thursday, Biden’s campaign called the ad buy “a significant move early in the general election that reflects the thoughtfulness and seriousness of the campaign’s outreach to the Latino community.”
The campaign released the commercials the same day that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the Trump administration’s efforts to overturn former President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program, which allows some undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children to avoid deportation. Meanwhile, Politico reported Thursday that the Latino Victory Super PAC is planning to raise and spend $4 million on a Hispanic voter turnout program in Florida.
“I’m so excited that they’re getting up and moving,” Democratic consultant Rosy Gonzalez Speers, who is spearheading down-ballot strategy for the Florida Democratic Party, said Thursday during a party conference call on Latinos. “It’s going to be extremely important if we want to win the election. We need to not just tell Latinos why Trump is so bad. We need to tell Latinos why we’re so good.”
Democrats are increasing spending on their efforts targeting Hispanic voters in Florida as Trump continues a long-running outreach effort that began a year ago when Vice President Mike Pence traveled to Miami to roll out the Latinos for Trump coalition. The president’s campaign has since held dozens of events catering to Hispanic voters, including an evangelicals rally Trump held at the beginning of the year in a majority-Hispanic Miami-Dade mega church.
“No amount of money spent will change the fact that Joe Biden has taken for granted and ignored the Latin American community,” Trump Victory Spokesman, Andres Malave, said in a statement. “Trump Victory and the Latinos for Trump coalition have built a permanent infrastructure in Florida hosting events in English and Spanish and recruiting and activating thousands of Latino volunteers to help elect President Trump and Republicans up and down the ballot.”
Miami Herald staff writer Bianca Padró Ocasio contributed to this report.
This story was originally published June 18, 2020 at 2:41 PM with the headline "Biden releases Spanish-language ads in Florida as Democrats ramp up Hispanic outreach."
