Abbott, O’Rourke spending $8M in appeal to Spanish speakers
In the race for the governor’s mansion, Spanish-speaking voters in Texas are hearing political ads in their language more than ever.
Gov. Greg Abbott and Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke are investing big in Spanish-language outreach as roughly a fourth of Texas’ eligible voters — some 4.4 million people — are Spanish speakers, according to new estimates from the census.
Both candidates have spent millions of dollars on Spanish-language political ads, running on Telemundo and Univision, Spanish radio stations and online.
Abbott’s Spanish-language ad spending has more than doubled compared with his two previous gubernatorial campaigns to roughly $5 million in broadcast and digital ads, according to Abbott political consultant Dave Carney.
He said the campaign is targeting South Texas voters of all cultural backgrounds.
“We’re not leaving certain Spanishspeaking Hispanics off the table. We’re trying to be everywhere,” said Carney, who added that the campaign has also hired bilingual door knockers who can engage voters in both Spanish and English.
The O’Rourke campaign has also made a major investment in Spanish-language outreach, spending $3 million on Spanish media ad buys and hiring the Spanish language firm Pescador.
The combined $8 million between two candidates is the most ever spent on Spanish-language ads in a Texas gubernatorial race, experts say.
O’Rourke has also gained traction among bilingual youth using the social media platform TikTok, which appeals to a younger audience than traditional
media.
Though most of the campaign’s 300 TikTok videos are in English, a handful of Spanish-only videos have gone viral, including a particularly poignant clip during a town hall event where a community leader from a housing development on the border, or colonia, asked O’Rourke what he would do to help his neighbors get access to running water.
“It’s not fair that there are more than twenty colonias that don’t have water. They deserve the treatment that we have in any city here in the United States. You pay your taxes, you follow the law and you need to have water and the other services that we have in the state of Texas,” O’Rourke responded in Spanish, promising to invest in bringing water to the community, in partnership with the county judge.
The video has received nearly half a million views on the platform and captured a moment that appeared quite genuine, according to anthropologist Cecilia Ballí.
“To have someone who’s standing there, listening in what seems like a very authentic way, and then to say, ‘I’m going to be your partner’ and to say it in Spanish, I think it’s all those things put together that made it very powerful,” she said.
University of Houston political scientist Jeronimo Cortina said no other statewide candidate in Texas has sought out the Latino vote as consistently as O’Rourke.
“The fact that he speaks Spanish is also to his advantage,” said Cortina, who said despite being a white, non-Latino, O’Rourke understands how to connect with young voters who are more likely to be interested in multicultural or bicultural societal issues, due to his experience living in El Paso — and he’s connecting on topics that resonate with voters.
“You can speak in Spanish, but if the content, the policy issue does not resonate with Latino voters, that’s not going to take you anywhere,” he said.
O’Rourke’s appeal to bilingual voters was evident at a Houston-area event mid-September when a diverse crowd (young, old, Latino, Black, white) wore “Segundo Barrio for Beto” shirts and waited for hours in a long line to shake the El Pasoan’s hand.
At the event, Consuelo Ramírez, a domestic worker and political organizer introduced herself to O’Rourke and asked, in Spanish, for his support in improving wages for workers like her.
“My hope is Beto and that’s why I ask people to unite, that we fight, that we don’t give up,” Ramírez said in Spanish, “We are proud immigrants, we are workers — not criminals. My work is very important for this country.”
Ramírez said she believes O’Rourke is a good representative for domestic workers in Texas, in part because he speaks Spanish, like many other immigrants such as herself.
But Carney, Abbott’s political consultant, disagrees with the notion that O’Rourke has any edge as a Spanish speaker, or that he’s any more qualified to speak to what appeals to Latino voters.
“He’s wrong on the issue of Hispanic voters,” said Carney, who emphasized that Abbott’s platform — and the governor’s consistent focus on issues of crime and the economy — will be what leads to the Republican candidate ultimately being reelected for a third term in November.
Last spring, Abbott promised to get more than half the Hispanic vote. For now, public polling shows him falling short of that, though Abbott leads in the polls overall.
The latest polling from the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas-Austin shows that while Abbott leads O’Rourke by 5 percentage points in the race, 52 percent of Latinos said they would vote for O’Rourke, compared with 33 percent who said they would vote for Abbott.
Securing the Latino vote is as important as ever in Texas, where the Latino population in Texas may have surpassed the white, non-Latino population, according to new U.S. Census estimates.
Among the 19.4 million Texans who are U.S. citizens and 18 years old or older, 4.4 million speak Spanish, according to recent census data.
Demographic shifts are occurring as hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Latin America, Asia and Africa have been naturalized in the past several years in Texas.
The University of California’s U.S. Immigration Policy Center identified 344,000 “newly naturalized” citizens across the state of Texas, or immigrants who have become citizens from 2016 through fiscal year 2021.