Latinx peoples represent a substantial voting bloc in the U.S., and outreach to Latinx voters has been the subject of increasing attention from political candidates and outside groups. “Issue advertising,” including ads carried within Spanish-language radio programming, represents an essential part of this direct outreach to voters (Pew, 2024; Terry & Severino, 2020). While academic research on political advertising tends to focus on overall spending or the legality of specific messages, there has been a significant gap in examining how political advertising can selectively target minoritized racial or ethnic groups.
We conducted two studies on this issue in 2018 and 2022, and below, we present the main results, context, and discussion of that work.
Our pilot study examined “Issue advertising” on Spanish-language radio during the 2018 midterm election (Terry & Severino, 2020). In this research, we examined how groups targeted Spanish speakers in the context of an election in which a significant part of the political rhetoric about immigration included “scary migrant caravans” and “invasions” at the U.S. southern border. We were surprised to discover that most of the issue advertising aired on Spanish-language radio during the 2018 cycle was not focused on immigration; instead, it centered on traditional election appeals related to bread-and-butter issues like education, health care, and taxes.
In our second research project on the 2022 midterm election, we examined the amount of money spent on advertising and the specific interest groups targeting the airtime of Spanish-language radio stations in the U.S. Rather than focus on the content of the ads; we explored the emergence of new political actors seeking to engage Latinxs in this radio sphere. Notably, our analysis of 2022 indicated that several right-leaning or far-right issue groups were utilizing Spanish radio to speak directly to Latinx voters.
Context of Issue Advertising and Spanish-Language Radio
In practical terms, broadcast political advertising falls into one of two legal categories. The first is candidate advertising, which involves political speech paid for with regulated money directly from a legally qualified candidate’s campaign funds. This category of ads is regulated under the §315 provisions established in 1934, which guarantee federal candidates access to the airwaves (Communications Act §315, 1934).
Therefore, legally qualified candidates can purchase political advertising at a relatively low cost; stations are required to provide access for this purpose; opposing candidates must be given an opportunity for equal-time purchases, and broadcast stations cannot censor the content of these ads for any reason. These protections apply to all candidates for federal office, and once a station sells ads to candidates in statewide or local elections, they apply to all legally qualified candidates in those races as well (Terry & Bard, 2011, 2013)
Alternatively, and much more common today, is the political advertising conducted by outside interest groups. Officially termed “non-candidate political advertising,” but more commonly referred to as “issue advertising,” this category of broadcast ads encompasses all political messaging that does not directly originate from a candidate’s legal campaign organization. Issue advertising does not benefit from the regulated pricing controls or access conditions guaranteed to candidate ads. Functionally, these ads are more expensive, tend to be more negative, and are often funded by unregulated political funds from SuperPACs.
Moreover, one of the substantial election expenditures remains the spending on election advertising on broadcast stations. While internet advertising captures a larger percentage of the market in each election cycle, the traditional 30- and 60-second ad on over-the-air radio and television remains the basic currency of any significant voter outreach (Axios, 2022). Therefore, despite the proliferation of the internet and social media, radio continues to play a critical role in Latinx media usage in the U.S., reaching around 94% of Latinx adults monthly (Nielsen, 2023).
Also, broadcast radio continues to offer various Spanish-language programming options, including at least fourteen distinct music or information programming formats. Furthermore, the common language is a significant unifying cultural trait of the Latinx community[1], and the role of radio in targeting these demographics with advertising should not be underestimated. As Dolores Casillas writes, “Spanish-language airwaves mediated the sensitive relationship between Latinxs as listeners and the various manifestations of state or government power.” (Casillas, 2014, p. 4). Overall, Spanish language radio creates a place for community and identity development for the many different groups that see themselves as Latinxs in the U.S. (Amaya, 2018).
Political Advertising Targeting Latinxs on Spanish-Language Radio Stations
The interest in our pilot study (2018) was substantial, leading us to conduct a similar inquiry during the 2022 cycle. Contemporary press reports indicated that in closely contested races, such as the U.S. Senate race in Wisconsin, GOP candidate Ron Johnson was directly engaging with the small yet influential population of Latinxs in South Milwaukee as part of his electoral strategy (Dell’Orto, 2024). Instead of assuming a specific appeal would target Latinxs, as we had with immigration in 2018, we focused on the groups and the resources spent talking to Latinxs.
After compiling a list of 578 radio stations that primarily broadcast programming in Spanish from a radio industry database, we utilized Federal Communications Commission data sourced from the agency’s public file database to develop our dataset. The first author has a commercial radio producer background and extensive experience managing the records found in stations’ public files. The analysis of the collected documents, which is a fairly intensive process, identified 100,570 individual political commercials, amounting to $18,329,179 in spending for issue advertising aired on Spanish-language radio during the 2022 election cycle.
A total of 213 interest groups were identified as having purchased time on at least one of 169 (29.2%) commercial Spanish-language formatted radio stations. Approximately two-thirds of this political activity was undertaken by just 22 (10.3%) of the identified issue groups. The interest in using this medium for political advertising is expanding, as our data showed that 52 Spanish-language formatted radio stations featured political advertising for the first time during the 2022 cycle.
What is the Relevance of What We Found?
The change in advertising strategies between the mid-year election cycles is stark. In 2018, most appeals were direct and traditional election issues and, somewhat surprisingly, frequently conducted in English despite appearing on Spanish-language radio. Unsurprisingly, liberal-leaning groups continued to court Latinx voters in 2022. Voters of color, including Latinxs, are often aligned with and assumed to support the Democratic Party, so a direct outreach through Spanish-language radio was not a surprise finding in either year. Politically left-leaning interest groups, including some large-scale national players, were among the top spenders, including Majority Forward, with 8.83% of the ads representing just over $1.5 million in spending. Senate Majority PAC was almost among the top advertising groups, running 8.35% of the total radio commercials in the sample while spending nearly $1.6 million to do so.
Despite the traditionally assumed association between Latinxs and the Democratic Party, longstanding Latinx associations with Catholicism also make Latinxs targets for messaging on conservative social issues like abortion. These appeals in issue ads reflected similar appeals made to a more traditionally GOP-leaning audience. Notably, in 2022, the analysis of this dataset suggested that these outreach efforts were often conducted in Spanish.
We identified spending by two very conservative groups using this type of outreach on social issues: American First Legal and Citizens for Sanity. These groups, publicly linked to anti-immigration efforts and noted for their leadership’s racist and homophobic statements (CHC, 2020), accounted for approximately 14% of all issue advertising on Spanish-language radio during the 2022 election cycle.
America First Legal clearly illustrates the political right’s new outreach efforts observed during the 2022 cycle. This organization, which aims to “fight back against lawless executive actions and the Radical Left,” was led by Stephen Miller, a senior advisor to President Donald Trump. According to their mission statement, they oppose “the radical left’s anti-jobs, anti-freedom, anti-faith, anti-borders, anti-police, and anti-American crusade.” America First Legal spent over $1.5 million, accounting for 8.3% of the total expenditure in the sample, matching the highest tier of Democratic Party-supporting issue groups in their outreach to Latinxs. This marks a significant shift in political advertising strategy aimed at Latinxs through Spanish-language radio compared to our pilot study conducted in 2018.
Meanwhile, Citizens for Sanity’s mission highlights the goal of bringing back “common sense to America” and defeating ‘wokeism’ and anti-critical thinking ideologies that have permeated every sector of our country and threaten the very freedoms that are foundational to the American Dream.”
These two GOP and Trump-supporting groups are associated with racial and ethnic political antagonism, contributing to affective polarization and tribalism, raising initial concerns that our data set may have been contaminated during the collection process. Consequently, after our analysis, we shared our findings with an election watchdog group that monitors political spending by candidates and outside organizations. In response, OpenSecrets confirmed that America First Legal had indeed funded a substantial number of Spanish-language advertisements and labeled their ads as “divisive” for aiming to pit non-white individuals against LGBTQ+ individuals.
The emergence of America First and Citizens for Sanity as key players in Spanish-language issue advertising highlights an unexplored area of “microtargeting” Latinxs with anti-immigration, anti-abortion, anti-left ideals, and anti-establishment sentiments. This trend appears to be gaining traction among certain conservative Latinx voters that have been overlooked or taken for granted by the Democratic Party.
Moreover, our 2018 study suggested that political groups were missing an opportunity to make targeted appeals in Spanish using the relatively low-cost option that Spanish-language radio represented. By 2022, an evolution in issue advertising had occurred, but this evolution appears to be primarily undertaken by groups from the right side of the political aisle. Liberal or left-leaning groups continued to use their Spanish radio campaigns in 2022 to drive voter turnout and promote Get Out the Vote efforts, especially during the later phases of the election cycle.
We suggest that the stark difference between these approaches should not be overlooked or misunderstood. As the dust settles on the 2024 presidential election and questions arise about the relatively strong Latinx voter support for Donald Trump’s nativist policies, including promises of mass deportations, it is easy to argue that conservative issue advertising on Spanish-language radio during the midterm elections in 2022 served as a testing ground for 2024 messaging outreach.
In 2022, liberal-leaning issue groups that reached out to their constituencies preferred to trust Latinxs to vote “correctly” if they would simply participate in the electoral process. This is a passive approach to political outreach and one that is less likely to lead to political activity, especially among infrequent voters. By comparison, the directly targeted appeals by America First Legal and Citizens for Sanity, intended to motivate conservative-leaning voters by utilizing wedge social issues, may prove far more effective. For instance, the support of more Latinx men for Trump in the 2024 election was arguably driven by promises of economic prosperity and inflation reduction. However, the connection between Latinx support and the emergence of ultra-conservative groups targeting Spanish-speaking Latinxs during the 2022 midterms provides exploratory evidence of the effectiveness of political advertising using the Spanish radio airwaves. It also suggests that conservative groups are potentially more effective than Democratic groups in the strategy and/or have tapped into a niche historically dominated by center or left groups and ideas.
This scenario shows something observers and scholars have claimed for years: the complexity of the Latinx vote cannot and should not be simplified or taken for granted. Instead, there is an increasing need for politicians and interest groups to develop more sophisticated engagement with this extremely diverse demographic.
If the old saying, “All politics are local,” still holds true, then the political far-right has found a media outlet and adopted a messaging strategy that targets Latinxs right where they are. Most Spanish-language radio stations in the U.S. are owned and operated locally as part of smaller media organizations (Terry & Carlson, 2019). We believe these tailored, niche political appeals on diverse media platforms will likely become even more direct in future cycles.
Note
The content of this piece is based on a multi–year project that has been published in academic journals.
Endnotes
[1] Approximately 75% of Latinxs in the US say they can confidently carry a conversation in Spanish (Pew, 2023).
References
Amaya, H. (2018). “Latinx Broadcasting in the United States.” In A Companion to the History of American Broadcasting, A. (Ed.). https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118646151.ch11
Axios. (2022). “Record Ad spend for 2022 Midterms.” Retrieved from: https://www.axios.com/2022/08/02/record-ad-spend-for-2022-midterms
Communications Act of 1934. Retrieved from: https://www.fcc.gov/media/policy/statutes-and-rules-candidate-appearances-advertising
Congressional Hispanic Caucus (2020). “Congressional Leaders Condemn White Nationalist Stephen Miller, Call for Immediate Removal From Role As White House Senior Advisor.” Retrieved from: https://chc.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/congressional-leaders-condemn-white-nationalist-stephen-miller-call-for
Casillas, D. I. (2014). Sounds of Belonging: US Spanish-language Radio and Public
Advocacy (Vol. 33). NYU Press.
Dell’Orto, Giovanna (2022). “In Milwaukee, Latinxs fed up with crime weigh GOP appeal.” The Associated Press. Retrieved from: HYPERLINK “https://apnews.com/article/us-news-religion-mexico-immigration-race-and-ethnicity-fa5fb5c8f45485d8eff212a548fa4c6c”https://apnews.com/article/us-news-religion-mexico-immigration-race-and-ethnicity-fa5fb5c8f45485d8eff212a548fa4c6c
Nielsen (2023) “Audio today 2023: How America listens.” Nielsen.
Retrieved from: https://radioinsight.com/headlines/253927/nielsen-releases-audio-today-2023-report/
Pew Research Center (2024). “Key Facts about Hispanic Eligible Voters in 2024.”
Retrieved from: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/01/10/key-facts-about-hispanic-eligible-voters-in-2024/
Pew Research Center (2023). “Latinxs’ Views of and Experiences with the Spanish Language.” Retrieved from:
Terry, C., & Bard, M. T. (2011). “Citizens United, Issue Ads and Radio: An Empirical Analysis.” CommLaw Conspectus, 20, 307.x`
Terry, C., & Bard, M. (2013). “Milwaukee Radio Public File Data, 1998-2011: An Empirical Analysis of Issue Advertising after the BCRA and Citizens United.” U. Fla. JL & Pub. Pol’y, 24, 157.
Terry, C., & Carlson, C. R. (2019). “Hatching Some Empirical Evidence: Minority Ownership Policy and the FCC’s Incubator Program.” Communication Law and Policy, 24(3), 403–432. https://doi.org/10.1080/10811680.2019.1627810
Terry, C., & Severino, F. (2020). “Spanish-Language Radio and Issue Advertising: Targeting Latinxs during the 2018 Elections.”Journal of Radio & Audio Media, 29(2), 381–395. https://doi.org/10.1080/19376529.2020.1827408
Featured Photo Credit: “A large amount of radios stacked on top of each other,” by Andrea De Santis, published on October 4, 2021, Free to use under the Unsplash License.
Here is the link to the two studies:
https://doi.org/10.1080/19376529.2025.2505047
https://doi.org/10.1080/19376529.2020.1827408