Seven million Hispanics will vote in the November presidential elections, a million more than in 2000, and according to a projection distributed yesterday that contingent will [carry] a significant weight in key states of the election…
And so went the lede to Roger Lindo’s May 26 article that ran in La Opinion, a Spanish-language daily that is the second most-read newspaper in Los Angeles with a circulation approaching 500,000. Lindo’s piece outlined the growing importance of the Hispanic electorate, and his was not the first article to fasten onto that phenomenon.
Other articles in this genre, including Kim Cobbs in the June 8 Houston Chronicle and Hans Nichols on May 19 in The Hill, focused on the unprecedented amounts of money the Bush and Kerry campaigns are pouring into paid ads for the Spanish-speaking media this campaign season. The Bush campaign aired its first Spanish-language ad in March and this past May the Kerry campaign aired its first ad. In addition, The New Democrat Network, a 527 group, airing Democratic ads in four battleground states with large Hispanic populations, has already spent $2.5 million dollars, according to NDN spokesman Guillermo Meneses.
All this is a follow up to the 2000 effort, when, according to Sergio Bendixen, a pollster consulting with Democrats in 2004, “Bush led the way.” In terms of advertising dollars, the facts are straightforward: Bush spent $2,274,000, while the Gore campaign only expended $909,000. Since the U.S. Census started counting Hispanics as an official group in the 1970s, candidates have learned the importance of wooing those voters. A candidate who fails to earn 30 percent of the Hispanic vote will not win the election. In 1976, Jimmy Carter won with 76 percent. In 1980 Reagan won 33 percent and then 37 percent in 1984. George H. W. Bush captured exactly 30 percent in 1988. In 1992 Bill Clinton won 61 percent before winning 71 percent in 1996. Then in the close 2000 election George W. Bush won 35 percent.
The Bush campaign complemented its ad campaign in 2000 with an aggressive outreach to reporters on Spanish-speaking networks. Its innovative approach and resounding success was so heralded that many Hispanic media outlets expected a similar, if not more extensive campaign to emerge from both campaigns for the 2004 election. They’re still waiting. So far this year, according to more than one prominent Hispanic reporter involved in covering the campaign, there has been no equivalent effort from either the Bush or the Kerry campaign.
That’s more than a little odd, because Hispanics now constitute the largest minority in the United States, edging out African-Americans by half a million people, according to a 2002 census, which measured the Hispanic population at 38.8 million or 13.5% of the total U.S. population. This number only stands to grow, as the 2000 census measured a 57.9% increase in the Hispanic population in the United States since the1990 census.
As the population continues to grow so does the influence of its mushrooming news business. According to the Latino Print Network, there are currently 40 Hispanic dailies boasting a circulation of 1.8 million up from 440,000 in 1990 when there were only 14 newspapers.
On the T.V. side, Univision is now the fifth largest television network in the United States and its news programs often draw more viewers than Fox News and CNN. In Southern California, the Univision and Telemundo news programs are the number one and number two most watched by 18-49 year olds. This trend holds true in many other locales, including Miami and New York.
In April the Pew Hispanic Center released a study documenting the vital role the Spanish-language media plays in the Hispanic community. Forty percent of Hispanics likely to vote — those who are U.S. citizens, registered voters, and have voted in past elections — get at least some of their news in Spanish.
In 2000, then-Gov. Bush’s experiences with Hispanics in Texas honed his awareness of the importance of the Hispanic vote and it became evident that the candidate knew that he could not capture the crucial 30 percent via the English-speaking media. Enter Sonia Colin, a Mexico City native, who worked as a producer, reporter, and news anchor with both Univision and Telemundo in San Antonio, Texas. After she had covered Bush for years while he served as governor of Texas, he asked her to join his presidential campaign in September 1999 as the Hispanic spokeswoman and coordinator.
Colin became the central contact and director of an operation that had never existed before. She set out to inundate the Hispanic media newsrooms with everything from translations of the candidate’s speeches to live video feeds of Bush events. Colin also drew up a large list of Hispanic surrogates to speak on behalf of then Gov. Bush.
For a Spanish-language news team, the result was a flood of pre-packaged material from the Bush campaign, compared to scraps from the Gore campaign. This, according to Jorge Ramos, star news anchor of Univision and recent author of The Latino Wave: How Hispanics Will Elect the Next American President, created “problems in balance of coverage.” Ramos’ news team met everyday and made a “superb effort” to balance the coverage, he says, “but all too often, information from the Gore campaign was either unavailable, untranslated, or simply slower in being delivered to us.”
George W. Bush’s ability to speak Spanish (and Al Gore’s inability) also exacerbated the difference in material available to the Spanish-speaking media. As Ramos told Campaign Desk, “every week we’d have many quotes from Bush in Spanish [to air], and at the same time none from Al Gore.”
The Gore campaign also failed to provide Univision and Telemundo with marquee Hispanic surrogates worthy of inclusion in their nightly newscasts.
Henrik Rehbinder, the editorial editor of La Opinion who studied the 2000 Hispanic election coverage by Univision and Telemundo for Hispanic Trends, recalled the typical spin room from the 2000 election. When Hispanic media was present, “the Bush campaign would have Rep. Diaz-Balart [R-Fla]…and [Chris] Lehane would be out there for Gore, unidentified.” Rehbinder noted, that when given a choice in a 2-minute segment the Hispanic production teams included the spin from Diaz-Balart, the high-profile Republican congressman, while brushing aside the comments from Lehane, the unidentified Democratic political strategist.
When the 2000 election came down to 538 votes in Florida, the Cuban community claimed credit for pushing Bush over the edge. (Of course, other groups claimed the same, from Orthodontists for Bush to Surfers for Bush.) Still, Colin’s effort was unprecedented, and the bottom line is that Bush garnered over 30 percent of the Hispanic vote nationwide, a threshold met by every winner since Jimmy Carter.
And this year? Well, Colin is in Mexico City, writing a book. Jorge Ramos, anchor of Noticiero Univision for over 16 years, told Campaign Desk, “I don’t see a Sonia Colin in either party.” He continued, “I haven’t seen an organized effort in this 2004 campaign,” characterizing the lack of attention by both campaigns as “political suicide.”
Juan Arango, a general manager with the Tribune Company’s Spanish-language newspaper HOY, echoes Ramos’ complaints, “By now we should have had a first step from [the campaigns] trying to reach Hispanic voters through us, instead it’s us trying to reach them.” This lack of interest crosses both sides of the aisle. “We haven’t had significant interest from Democrats or Republicans trying to get in touch with us.”
A couple feel otherwise. Joe Peyronnin, executive vice president of Telemundo, mentioned that his network had already interviewed Sen. Kerry and referred to receiving materials from both the White House and the Kerry campaign. Although, he noted, the Kerry campaign sends less. Still, he expects the efforts of both campaigns “to get more aggressive…as the general election wears on.”
On the Democratic side, Rehbinder of La Opinion cited contact with the Kerry campaign noting that “Democrats are doing a little better than in the past.” But, perhaps tellingly, Rehbinder then shared an anecdote about a contact within the Edwards campaign, while providing no mention of a counterpart in the Kerry campaign.
Overall, Sandy Close, executive director of New California Media, a nationwide association of ethnic media organizations, reaffirms the disappointment voiced by Ramos and Arango. The Spanish-language media wants to feel engaged and attract candidates to debates, says Close, but “you just don’t have what a lot of our media colleagues expected in this very decisive presidential year.”
“It’s almost invisible,” Close added.
This is a problem that Close partly attributes to battleground politics. Simply, many states with large Hispanic populations, — such as California, New York, and Texas — are not expected to be up for grabs in the November election.
Still, Jorge Ramos is watched by a large audience of Hispanic Miamians every evening, and it seems there would be no better way to reach them than through someone like Ramos, who says he has heard precious little from either campaign.
By contrast, Sharon Castillo, national Hispanic spokesperson for the Bush-Cheney ’04 told Campaign Desk that, “We have an aggressive bilingual earned and paid Spanish-language media campaign.” (Paid media refers to ad buys and earned media refers to campaign events that generate news coverage). Furthermore, she says she works to “make sure that the Spanish media has the same access” as the mainstream English-speaking media.
In fact, Castillo, who previously worked as a spokesperson with the Republican National Committee and as a journalist with Telemundo, asserts, “It’s safe to say that we started earlier [than 2000] and are devoting more resources,” in terms of money and making people available to the Hispanic media.
Over a period of two days, the Kerry campaign failed to comment on its Hispanic media efforts. At the campaign’s request, Campaign Desk submitted a list of questions via email, one of which was as simple as, “”What is the Kerry campaign doing to reach out to the Hispanic media?” Campaign Desk has received no reply, other than suggestions that we also contact the Democratic National Committee, which we did, where we also received no reply.
Colin, who was not invited to join the Bush White House, believes, “Campaign 2000 was a beginning and there should be a follow-up. Of course there is an effort, but it is not enough.”
She says, “They are taking a different approach this time,” by which she means there is no Sonia Colin this time around for the Spanish-language press to get in touch with. Colin attributes the change to a “lack of experience of some people,” as well as increased attention on the war and the economy.
This year, the campaigns and their surrogates appear to have thrown their resources into advertising, not into cultivating reporters. As Bendixen mentioned, there are very “professional operations on both sides” getting commercials out to the Spanish-language media that are written in Spanish for Hispanics. Gone are the days of translating English-speaking ads into Spanish.
Nonetheless, the impact of actual reporters is undeniable. Ramos, who was named one of the “Ten Most Admired Latinos” by Latino Leaders magazine, told Campaign Desk, “By the beginning of early 2000 Sonia was already in touch with me. By election time we were on a first-name basis. That made the whole difference.”
This year, he’s still waiting for the phone to ring.
Thomas Lang was a writer at CJR Daily.