Spanish-language media key to victory with Latinos

While the dust was still settling last week in the Democratic presidential race between Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, presumptive Republican nominee John McCain was kicking up his general election advertising war — on Spanish-language radio.

Smart move.

Obama, the Democratic survivor, is still figuring out how to win over the huge Hispanic voting bloc that strongly favored Clinton in the primaries. But McCain already has begun his Hispanic media campaign — in Spanish and English — in the hopes of copying the successes that President Bush had with those voters.

Republican candidates spent more advertising dollars to woo Hispanic voters in recent presidential elections, and Bush won two terms in the White House with 40 percent of the Latino vote.

But with the Democratic Party finally realizing it cannot take Hispanics for granted, the McCain campaign is bracing for the toughest competition ever for Latino support.

After introducing its first Spanish television ad in April and then going back onto Spanish radio in New Mexico and Nevada last week, the McCain campaign has produced 10 other ads targeting Hispanics that will roll out when the time is right.

“We know that what’s going to be different is that we have a smarter opponent than ever before,” said Lionel Sosa, McCain’s top Hispanic media strategist, who has worked with Bush and other Republicans for decades. Obama’s campaign will be “bigger, stronger, smarter than ever before,” Sosa predicted.

There is another striking difference in this year’s Latino campaign.

In the 2000 and 2004 presidential contests, Bush was comfortable enough with Spanish to regularly use it in his campaigns against former Vice President Al Gore and Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry, who did not speak the language. This year the situation is reversed, as Obama recently proved when he spoke directly into the television camera in a Spanish-language ad that aired during the Puerto Rico primary.

Obama’s Spanish ads are “quite good,” and Obama “apparently has learned Spanish well enough to do his own commercials,” Sosa said. “But it’s not who knows the language best. It’s who knows Latinos best, and there’s no doubt that McCain knows Latinos best.”

The candidates’ messages are more important than the language in which they are delivered. Still, the changing demographics of the U.S. Latino population have complicated how the candidates communicate with Hispanic communities.

In previous years, English-dominant second- and third-generation Latinos were the likely voters. Now, almost half of Hispanic voters are foreign-born. NDN, a progressive Democratic group, estimates that about eight out of 10 Hispanics speak Spanish at home.

There are other signs of the growing Hispanic market. There are now 872 Spanish-language radio stations in the U.S., up from 587 in 2000, according to Arbitron, which tracks radio listeners.

Arbitron also noted that the “key growing and emerging” Hispanic markets — in addition to those that are already well-established — are outside the Miami area and in South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Indiana and Nevada.

Hispanics could determine the outcome of the McCain/Obama contest in New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Florida, states that Bush won by less than 5 percent of the vote in 2004.

English and Spanish radio is considered the best media source for Hispanics, but Spanish-language television news also is a powerful presence in the lives of Latinos.

The local television newscasts of the top-rated Univision Spanish-language network lead in 16 markets, including Las Vegas, Miami and Albuquerque, N.M., according to an NDN study.

“We are going to see the most money spent on Spanish-language media than we have ever seen before,” said Simon Rosenberg, president of NDN. READ MORE

By: GEBE MARTINEZ - Politico.com