The Latino Battleground You Haven’t Heard About

It hasn’t received nearly the same fanfare and build-up as the presidential and vice presidential debates, but Thursday features an event that may prove just as consequential — the first of dueling town halls from Spanish-language television giant Univision.

Both campaigns know it, which led to painstaking, debate-like negotiations with the Trump and Harris campaigns over the details, according to interviews with both campaigns and the television network. When Univision suggested Miami — where the network has its headquarters — as the venue for both town halls, the Trump campaign welcomed the prospect. A Univision official joked that when the Trump campaign was approached with the idea, the tenor of the answer was: “A Univision town hall? Sure, if it’s in Miami and the audience is full of Cubans.”

The Harris campaign, on the other hand, quickly knocked down the idea of a town hall in a heavily Cuban American city where Trump has robust support. They preferred Nevada, where Latinos tend to be Mexican American, and thus more Democratic-leaning in their voting habits. Univision agreed to Las Vegas on Oct. 10.

The town halls offer the best opportunity former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris will get to reach a coast-to-coast, Spanish-speaking audience in an election where the Latino vote is increasingly up for grabs. Latinos are poised to play a pivotal role across the battleground state landscape in November, not only in the Sun Belt states where Latino populations are highest but in Rust Belt stalwarts like Pennsylvania, where Latinos are the state’s fastest-growing demographic group — and a significant bloc in small- and mid-sized cities spanning from northeastern Pennsylvania to the Lehigh Valley.

“[Trump will] be speaking nationally to a Hispanic audience that Democrats typically win by 40 points and he can bluntly go in to speak in as limited a filter as he can to those voters,” said Giancarlo Sopo, a Republican operative who led Trump's Hispanic advertising in 2020.

An estimated 36.2 million Latinos are eligible to vote this year, according to the Pew Research Center , up from 32.3 million in 2020. They’re projected to account for roughly 15 percent of all eligible voters on Election Day, which would represent a new high. Both campaigns jumped at the chance to speak directly to those voters, but carefully negotiated the precise details surrounding the venues.

Trump’s town hall will be held in Miami on Oct. 16, which provides him with something of a home field advantage in his adopted state of Florida. (The event was originally scheduled for Oct. 8 but was rescheduled due to the expected impact of Hurricane Milton).

The city is the site of one of Trump’s greatest electoral successes: after Hillary Clinton trounced him in Latino-majority Miami-Dade County by 30 points in 2016, Trump narrowed the margin to just seven points there in 2020 by making big gains with south Florida Hispanics hailing from countries like Cuba, Colombia and Venezuela. Trump’s surprise performance in the state’s most populous county effectively doomed Joe Biden’s chances of winning the perennial swing state, and it isn’t even on the battleground map this election cycle.

Trump’s inroads with Latinos continues to be reflected in this year’s polling — a Telemundo poll released last week showed that Trump is beating Harris among Latinos in Florida outright, 48 percent to 41 percent, with 7 percent undecided.

The network has promised to stock the audience with undecided voters and partnered with Los Angeles public opinion research firm Evitarus, which conducts focus groups, to fly a representative group of undecided Hispanic voters from across the country, rather than being drawn from Miami or swing states.

The process, led by Lourdes Torres, Univision’s senior vice president of politics, is designed to underscore the fact that Latinos are not a monolithic voting group. The network said each town hall will have 15 to 20 people selected by its news team to ask questions.

Ahead of the town hall, the Trump campaign said it will focus on the “unaffordable economy and unsafe streets.”

“President Trump is also committed to earning votes from and governing on behalf of all Americans, and if you want to earn these votes, you have to show up and make your case for how you’ll do it,” senior advisor Jason Miller, who helped negotiate the town hall, told POLITICO Magazine.

Univision also tried pitching a Miami town hall to the Harris campaign — an idea that quickly went nowhere. Even an offer to fly in swing voters from Arizona, Pennsylvania and Nevada to Miami was rejected. A Harris campaign official, who requested anonymity to speak frankly about the negotiations, described their response as “you guys are crazy to think we want to be in Miami.”

Univision instead agreed to Nevada, a competitive swing state that was more amenable to the Harris campaign, which is already heavily invested in the state and where Harris has already campaigned frequently.

“We felt we wanted to do it in the Southwest, those are the people we're focusing on,” the Harris campaign staffer said. “We’re talking to Latinos in Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina too, but we thought it was important to do it in Las Vegas.”

Univision is similarly flying in undecided voters from across the country for the Harris town hall.

Nevada is far more competitive this year than in recent elections. While Democrats have stacked wins over the last two decades and Biden won the state by two percentage points in 2020, there was a hiccup during the 2022 midterms, with Democrat Steve Sisolak becoming the only incumbent governor in the nation to lose.

Even the Culinary Workers Union Local 226, the politically powerful service industry union which represents thousands of casino and hospitality workers in Las Vegas, warns Nevada could go red for the first time since George W. Bush in 2004.

Despite the union’s endorsement of Harris this summer, “We think if the election was today we would lose Nevada,” a Culinary official said.

A Vegas town hall gives Harris a high-profile platform in a state that was badly bruised by the pandemic, and where the economy and rising housing costs are top of mind, two issues Harris plans to hit, according to her campaign. It also offers a chance to speak to Hispanic men, a voting group with whom Trump has made gains.

The Culinary Union is ramping up its blue-chip ground game and expects Harris' standing to improve.

“Groceries are the number one issue and housing is number two and Kamala Harris has a plan for that,” Bethany Khan, the Culinary Union spokesperson, told POLITICO magazine. “What is Donald Trump’s plan for more Americans to buy homes?”

Univision itself has much to gain or lose from the two town halls. The network was blasted over a sit-down interview with Trump by veteran journalist Enrique Acevedo last year, an encounter that was widely viewed as a softball interview. The episode appeared to signal a shift in approach from the network after it merged with Grupo Televisa, which is seen as working closely with Mexican government leaders. The presence of network executives at the interview, for example, seemed to confirm they would be more chummy with Trump, and the former president’s comments that the new owners were “unbelievable entrepreneurial people, and they like me,” only reinforced questions about Univision’s independence.

Joaquin Blaya, an architect of the Univision network who served as its president and hired Jorge Ramos in 1984, called the Trump/Acevedo interview an “absolute embarrassment.” He said how Univision handles the town halls will say a lot about its plans heading into the next administration.

“Are they going to be an impartial vehicle?” he asked. “That’s the question. The burden of proof is on Univision and Enrique Acevedo. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt but the burden is on them.”

Univision has since mended its relationship with Democrats, in part by scheduling a Phoenix interview of Joe Biden and campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez in 2024.

“Noticias Univision is honored to host town halls that will enable Hispanic voters to engage directly with both the U.S. presidential candidates,” Daniel Coronell, the president of Noticias Univision and TelevisaUnivision said. “These town halls demonstrate the growing importance and decisive force of Latino voters in U.S. elections — which today represent 15 percent of the electorate — and serve as critical and informative events for all voters nationwide.”

For Acevedo, who will moderate both events, it’s a chance to show his political chops and more fully flesh out his profile. He is seen by many as the heir apparent to longtime star anchor Jorge Ramos, who decided to part ways with the network recently after 38 years. Ramos, an Acevedo friend who served as a witness at his wedding, had delivered a stinging criticism that the Trump interview “put in doubt the independence of our news department.”

That went over badly within the walls of TelevisaUnivision.

“When have you seen David Muir say he didn't like how an ABC News interview was done or Scott Pelley criticize a CBS interview?” a senior Univision official said.

The official described Acevedo’s expected role as akin to a referee in a soccer match.

“When the referee goes unnoticed it means the game was good, there was a great exchange, and the audience got what they were looking for,” the official said.

But there won’t be any fact-checking in the wake of recent controversies over the fact-checking roles assumed by debate moderators.

“We don't think debunking that immigrants eat dogs and cats is productive for anyone,” the official continued, referring to a controversial moment in the presidential debate when Trump falsely accused Haitian immigrants in Ohio of eating people’s pets. “It’s giving absurdity the highest possible national forum, time that could be spent discussing important issues relevant to people's lives.”