The Hispanic Press: Still Waiting for Bush and Kerry

Will Kerry repeat Dems 2000's losing Latino outreach?

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.

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.

...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.