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Joe Biden may be on the backfoot with Hispanic voters in the upcoming presidential election after Donald Trump courted executives from the nation's most influential Spanish-language network last week.
The former president and frontrunner in the Republican primaries hosted executives from Univision, which merged with the Mexican media company Grupo Televisa in 2021, at Mar-a-Lago last week while the network interviewed him, per The Washington Post.
The publication reported that the company cancelled ads by the Biden campaign that had been scheduled to air during an interview with Trump. As per a new Univision policy, opposition ads are no longer allowed during single-candidate interviews, meaning that Trump ads would similarly not be allowed to run during a Biden interview.
Univision also cancelled a booking with Biden's Hispanic Media Director Maca Casado to respond to the Trump interview after it aired on the network's late news broadcast, according to anonymous sources cited by the newspaper.
Newsweek has contacted representatives for Biden and TelevisaUnivision to comment on this story.
"The new ownership is essentially co-opting and kidnapping the soul and mission of what Univision has been up to now, and they are serving it up on a silver platter to Donald Trump," Maria Cardona, a political consultant and member of the Democratic National Committee told the publication in response to the story. "It is going to mask the pernicious and dangerous politics that Donald Trump is going to implement if he becomes president again."
It comes amid concerns within the Democratic party about potential partisan realignment among Latino communities. A September Univision poll found that Trump is overwhelmingly favored by Hispanic voters in the Republican primaries. The network said it interviewed 1,400 Hispanics registered to vote nationwide (including 625 Republican Latinos) for the poll.
Meanwhile, Latinos were the least supportive ethnic group in Biden's run in the 2020 presidential race with only 59 percent of Hispanics backing him over Trump, according to Pew Research Center data. Comparatively, 90 percent of Black voters and 64 percent of Asian American voters cast their ballots for Biden.
And while Biden won a majority of Latino voters in Florida, his support was down 10 percent from Hillary Clinton's in 2016.
In 2020, Trump managed to outperform his 2016 showing among Latino voters.
However, the September Univision poll also found that Latino voters support Democrats on many of their key policy issues and that in an election between Biden and Trump, 58 percent would vote for the Democrat and 31 percent would vote for the former Republican president.
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About the writer
Kate Plummer is a Newsweek reporter based in London, U.K. Her focus is on U.S. politics and national affairs, and ... Read more