Carmona, Flake spent combined $228,00 on Spanish-language ads

Cronkite News Service reported that Democrat Richard Carmona and Republican Jeff Flake spent much less on Spanish-language advertisement than on English-language commercials in their U.S. Senate campaigns:

Joseph Garcia, director of the Latino Public Policy Center at Arizona State University’s Morrison Institute for Public Policy, said that it wasn’t surprising that the candidates invested more in English-language advertising.

“He (Carmona) had to match him ad for ad, and that’s what we saw,” Garcia said. “Are you going to give up that tit-for-tat over the English-speaking channels in order to have more of a presence on the Spanish-speaking channels?

“I think it was just such a battle that neither one of them felt like, ‘We can invest more into the Spanish-language.’”

Bruce Merrill, a senior research fellow at the Morrison Institute, said that without a spike in the number of Latinos voting they haven’t had a large impact on elections. That appeared to be the case again this year, he said.

“I’ve been here 40 years and it’s never happened,” Merrill said.

Merrill said he suspected that the Flake campaign’s Spanish-language ad buys were more to establish a presence than to gain votes.

“The Flake people knew what we all know – that they weren’t going to vote for Flake anyway,” he said. “The Hispanics that did vote for Flake would’ve voted for him whether they saw a Spanish-language ad or not.”

Read: Carmona, Flake campaigns spent combined $228,00 on Spanish-language ads