WASHINGTON ― With less than a week to go before the election, the Republican Party is finally running its first Spanish-language ad on television to target Latino voters.
The Republican National Committee will spend $250,000 to run the ad on Telemundo and Univision, the two biggest Spanish-language networks, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.
The ad “is one more effort in our Hispanic engagement this cycle that espouses the conservative principles that many Hispanics share with the Republican Party,” RNC Hispanic media spokeswoman Sofia Boza said in an email, adding that the party “benefits all Americans on issues of importance such as the economy, religious liberty, school choice and national security.”
The Republican Party faces an uphill battle with Latinos ― as does the GOP presidential nominee, Donald Trump, who is not mentioned in the ad.
Responding to The Huffington Post’s question about why the RNC waited so long to launch a Spanish-language TV ad, Boza said the RNC, “for many months,” has run online ads in Spanish “featuring a diverse group of Hispanics who have specifically advocated for Mr. Trump.”
The Republican Party faces an uphill battle with Latinos ― as does the GOP presidential nominee, Donald Trump, who is not mentioned in the ad. In virtually every poll, Latino voters prefer Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton to Trump by huge margins, and many Republicans running in states with large Latino populations have attempted to distance themselves from him.
Here’s the new RNC ad in English:
The Republican Party’s online ads that target Latinos do mention Trump. One of them, released in October in English, spends 35 seconds discussing President Barack Obama and Clinton before a 10-second sign-off on Trump at the end.
The Trump campaign, meanwhile, has never run a television ad in Spanish, although the pro-Trump Great America PAC ran one comparing Clinton to a dog with fleas.
The Clinton campaign and Democrats have done more Spanish-language advertising than Trump and Republicans. The Democratic National Committee has released three Spanish-language radio ads that are playing on more than 700 stations across the country, a DNC spokesman said.
In June, the Clinton campaign launched its first ad in Spanish for the general election, although the campaign’s advertising on Spanish-language television later dipped after the party convention.
Overall, Clinton has run “dozens” of ads in Spanish and English targeting Latino audiences, according to the campaign. One Spanish-language television ad launched this week, encouraging the approximately 27 million Latinos eligible to vote to get to the polls.
This article has been updated with a comment from RNC Hispanic media spokeswoman Sofia Boza.
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