President Biden’s re-election campaign leader Julie Chavez is ramping up its strategy this week to try to win over Latino voters, with plans to use Wednesday’s Republican primary debate in California as a backdrop for new efforts to gain support from a critical constituency, according to two senior campaigns officials.
The campaign’s broader strategy includes tailored ads for Latino voters in battleground states using narrators with accents from their countries or regions of origin; messaging on television and digital platforms that are popular with Latinos; and standing up an early effort to counter misinformation aimed at Latino voters, which Democratic officials believe eroded some support for Biden among Latinos in 2020.
“President Biden’s campaign knows Latinos’ political power and is investing early and aggressively to make his case because we won’t take their votes for granted,” said Maca Casado, Hispanic media director for the Biden campaign.
The campaign’s new playbook comes as polling shows that enthusiasm among Latino voters is lagging. A new NBC News poll released this week found 51% of Latinos have a high interest in the election, compared with 73% of white voters. Overall, Latinos currently have a lower interest in the 2024 election than at this same point in past election cycles.
Shoring up Latino support, and voter turnout, could make the difference for Biden in key states in what’s expected to be a tight race, particularly if it’s a rematch between Biden and Republican front-runner, former President Donald Trump. While Biden overwhelmingly won among Latino voters in 2020, that year Trump gained more of their support from him than in the 2016 election.
“Latino voters have been the swing factor in some swing states for a number of electoral cycles, but especially now, given the size that they have attained across the country and in key pockets,” said Victoria DeFrancesco Soto, a political scientist and analyst for NBC News and Telemundo.
On the sidelines of Wednesday’s GOP debate at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison and Biden campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez plan to host a series of events focused on Latino voters, Biden campaign officials said.
One event, they said, will specifically focus on Latino men, whose support for Biden trails that of Latina women. A poll released Monday by Univision, a co-sponsor of the GOP debate, found that Biden leads Trump among Latino men 54% to 38%, while among Latina women his lead is much wider — 61% to 25%.
The Biden campaign is also deploying Spanish-speaking surrogates to Simi Valley, including Rep. Verónica Escobar, D-Texas, and the mayor of Tucson, Arizona, Regina Romero, campaign officials said.
The Democratic National Committee, which has a significantly larger staff than the Biden campaign, is playing a key role in the president’s broader strategy. The DNC is running a program to register as many as possible of the more than four million Latinos who’ve turned 18 since the 2020 election and are now eligible to vote, Democratic officials said. The party apparatus has established a “boot camp,” as well, these officials said, to train and hire more bilingual staff to deploy in battleground states for outreach to Spanish-speaking voters.
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