Tomorrow (Tuesday) is the last day to vote in California’s recall election, and heading into the final stretch, campaigns on both sides are trying hard to sway Latinos, who make up a sizable chunk of the electorate.
Latinos represent 35% of California’s adult population, but account for only 21% of those most likely to vote — nearly 60% of whom are registered Democrats — according to the Public Policy Institute of California. California’s Latino voters have also helped hand Democrats a complete lock on the Legislature.
“No politician can take Latino votes and our community for granted,” Olga Miranda, president of SEIU Local 87, said at a recent phone- banking event to persuade voters to reject the recall of Gov. Gavin Newsom.
In addition to phone banks, rallies and grassroots-level organizing, both sides of the recall contest have in recent weeks pumped the airwaves — and social media platforms — with Spanish-language television and radio ads to garner crucial Latino votes.
Manuel Pastor, director of the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California, said this recall election shows how campaign messaging to Latino voters has evolved from the days when candidates would just say a few words in Spanish.
“I think you’re starting to see some level of sophistication, which is not so much around what kind of Spanish you speak as it is around what kind of issues you address and whether or not they actually hit people where they live,” he said.
Hector Barajas, a Republican political consultant working on the effort to remove Newsom, said people of color, and Latinos in particular, have borne the brunt of the pandemic, both financially and physically. The pro-recall campaign leans into that frustration, betting that families who’ve been pushed to the margins will vote to remove Newsom.
For example, a Spanish-language radio ad from the conservative group Rescue California directly blames Newsom for the hardship that many working families in the state have experienced, emphasizing the high cost of living and the negative impact that online learning has had on children.
Meanwhile, opponents of the recall — who are labeling the effort a “Republican power grab” — have tried to cast a light on the anti-immigrant stances of some key players behind the campaign, in a defensive effort to scare and mobilize Spanish-speaking Latino voters.
But are either of these strategies actually effective in engaging the Latino electorate? Earlier this month, KQED sat down with two families — one from the East Bay and one from the Central Valley, representing different political and regional perspectives — to hear their thoughts on how to successfully earn their votes.
KQED’s María Peña and Lina Blanco facilitated two intimate focus groups with the families to record their responses to nine Spanish-language political ads from both sides of the recall effort, as well as spots from two recall candidates: Kevin Faulconer and Larry Elder.
Turning our mics to families
In our first focus group, we spoke with three members of the Díaz family, representing two generations: Itzel, who considers herself independent or nonpartisan, and her parents María de Jesus and Porfirio, who are both registered Democrats. All three were born in Jalisco, Mexico, and voted in the U.S. for the first time in the 2020 presidential election. They all speak Spanish as their first language and call Oakland home.
The second focus group included three members of the Avila family, who also represent two generations: Debbie and her brother Obed, as well as their mother Adela. All three are registered Republicans, self-identify as Mexican American, and speak Spanish fluently. Debbie and Adela live in Modesto and Obed lives in Merced.
In both bilingual conversations, we asked participants the same questions:
- “How do each of these ads make you feel?”
- “What stood out to you while watching them?”
- “On a scale of 1 to 5, how likely are you to vote YES or NO on the recall after watching each one?”
KQED then opened the floor for participants to suggest strategies politicians should consider implementing in future elections to better reach and engage Latino voters.
A range of reactions
Itzel, the independent voter from Oakland, said she was initially struck by Kevin Faulconer’s fluency in Spanish. She had grown used to seeing political ads where a politician would speak just a phrase of Spanish here or there and consider it enough to win her vote. Yet, she was most taken by how staged she thought the casting seemed, and the general lack of Latino representation on-screen.
“I felt it was like a series of checkboxes. It’s the way they think what Hispanics look like. I didn’t see a representation of Afro-Latinos or queer Latinos,” she said of the Faulconer ad. “It’s very obvious who they think are not going to vote for them.”
Her father, Porfirio, agreed, saying Faulconer’s ad tailored its message toward well-to-do Latinos. Like Itzel, he believes this reveals how little most politicians and strategists seem to know about California’s incredibly diverse Latino population, and how many political ads seem designed to only reach a selective few.
After viewing Spanish-language ads for Elder — one of the candidate speaking from his office and another voiced by former Democratic state Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero, who recently endorsed him — Itzel called them “horrible,” both in content and delivery. She noted that Elder’s accent felt very forced.
‘Lack of imagination’
But what frustrated Itzel most was that both ads emphasized school closures during the pandemic and the negative impact it has had on youth.
“The schools did not close. The classes continued online and the children continued learning,” she said. “They do not mention the effort, the operation and the infrastructure that it took [to get] digital access to a lot of those children that never had it before,” she said.
