Mohammad Bari
Dr. Ocampo-Roland
Latinx Politics
26 April 2023
Strategies for Donald Trump to Best Appeal to the Latinx Community
The Latinx community is exemplified as a diverse group of nationalities from North, Central, and South America. Each nationality, despite social and political adversities, came to establish communities in the United States. Now carrying a sizeable amount of political power within the US, the “Latino vote” has the ability to single-handedly swing the results of elections. From local to national elections, politicians have both taken notice and are devising strategies to gain the political support of the Latinx community. Donald Trump, former President of the United States, is notorious for his divisive as well as prejudicial
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During the 2016 election, Trump frequently touted Latinx immigrants as “criminals”, “rapists”, and “thugs”. In the tumultuous 2020 election that followed, he would continue his invidious speech filled with attacks on the Latinx community regarding immigration and crime. However, it is imperative to convey that Trump, alongside the Republican Party, has more sizeable, widespread support from the Latinx community than researchers anticipated. Nevertheless, not only was Trump’s re-election campaign a failure, the Latinx community still mainly gives their political support to the Democratic Party. As such, Trump must reconsider his mobilization strategies, his divisive rhetoric, as well as appeal to all different kinds of Latinx voters in order to win their support. Thus, in order for Trump to have a chance at holding office again, he must utilize more inclusive appeals like utilizing Spanish ads that target specific Latinx sub-cultures in order for them to feel seen, stop treating the Latinx community as a …show more content…
Political ads, whether on television, in the newspaper, or on social media are well-established to be required in order for a candidate to run a successful campaign. Therefore, there is no surprise to see Trump running political ads on both social media and television against now-President Joe Biden. Both Biden and Trump were aware of the importance of the Latinx vote in that particular presidential election. Therefore, both Biden and Trump ran political ads targeted toward Latinx voters in states like Arizona or Florida that have large Latinx populations. Imperatively, both candidates utilized both English and Spanish in their political advertisements. This comes as no surprise as it is well-established by political scientists that when a candidate attempts to appeal to a certain ethnic community, utilizing their respective language can generally garner more support from said community. However, a candidate cannot just re-write an advertisement spoken in English to Spanish and believe that that will garner support from the Latinx community. As stated by Flores and Coppock, “viewing a Spanish-language ad increased the likelihood of those that viewed the ad to vote for the advertised candidate by 5%... mistargeting and over-generalizing can have disastrous results” (Flores and