Picture the quadrennial ritual. The candidates descend on Texas, and every four years somebody in a conference room announces the arrival of the sleeping giant — the Latino electorate, forever about to wake, forever sleeping in. Well. At The Texas Tribune Festival on Saturday, a panel of analysts delivered the official eulogy for that metaphor, and the verdict came with a price tag: eight hundred thousand dollars, spent not in October, not in September, but during the World Cup, on Spanish-language television ads, in a Senate race still months from decision day.
The spender was James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, whose campaign dropped $800,000 on a Spanish-language ad blitz on Telemundo during the U.S. and Mexico group-stage matches, as Jason Villalba — head of the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation and a former Republican state representative — pointed out. His Republican opponent, Ken Paxton, is right there in the arena too, running ads in Spanish and in what the panel described as Spanish-accented English. You’re seeing state candidates do a much better job putting media in the ether earlier and being consistent about that, Villalba said.
The stakes, in one number: an estimated 25% of Texas voters in the coming election will be Latino. Nowhere does that land harder than in South Texas, where tight congressional races will hinge on candidates demonstrating they care about the issues that actually matter to Latino voters rather than parachuting in with a mariachi and a mailer.
Latinos don’t want to be invited to the kiddy table anymore, said Sergio García-Ríos, a political scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. They want to hear that the campaign is embracing Latino issues.
Ah, but the wooing has gotten complicated, deliciously so for the strategists and miserably so for the autopilot era of campaigning. Yes, Spanish-language ads signal a campaign cares about the community, Villalba said. But Stephanie Valencia, president of the Latino research firm Equis, warned that Latino-coded advertising by itself doesn’t close the deal. Voters are smart, she said. They’re like, ‘don’t try to pull the wool over my eyes by doing something in Spanish.’
The numbers and the mood point the same direction. Immigration and deportation ranked as the second-most important issue in September, per recent polling Valencia cited. The crackdowns are fueling distrust of the Republican Party — which keeps the bloc very much in play despite its rightward shift in 2024. And yet both parties carry the baggage: past immigration-policy missteps on each side mean, as Valencia put it, that there is a fundamental mistrust of all parties.
So the playbook, per the panel, is the old retail politics dressed in new metrics: appeal to these voters as individuals, not as a bloc — fitting for an electorate with a historic tendency to vote for candidates rather than parties. And Valencia supplied the metaphor to replace the deceased giant. Latinos are no longer a sleeping giant … We are the swinging giant, she said. And we will be the swinging giant for the foreseeable future. The swinging giant — two parties on the porch with flowers, and nobody promised anything.