Republican firms are looking to capitalize on demographic changes and expand service lines to campaigns and groups to target Latino voters this cycle.
Latinos could potentially cast some 36.2 million votes in 2024 — a nearly 4-million vote increase over the last presidential cycle.
Moreover, these voters are spread across key battleground states, including Arizona, Nevada, Colorado and Florida, giving them influence over both the presidential and the campaign for control of Congress.
GOP firms like The Lukens Company (TLC) say they see a major opportunity for their clients.
“We think it’s a great moment, a great opportunity, and we have a strong and unique approach to actually help our clients in bringing more victories for conservative causes,” said Alejandro Yordi, a voter contact strategist who helps lead TLC’s Hispanic Outreach practice.
“One thing that is going to differentiate us a lot from other companies is that we want to address the Hispanic audience not by telling them how special they are because they’re different from other audiences, but because they [share] many of the same goals and aspirations [as] the rest of the political universes.”
“So our focus is not going to be on how to treat a group different from others, but on how to find what makes them more similar to other groups.”
Yordi pointed to how White and Latino working class voters share similar traits. “Many political leaders, on both sides of the aisle, they’re just stereotyping this audience. They’re not understanding what they’re looking for, what they need. So they talk always about the same issues or about racial minorities and injustices, but that’s not what most Hispanics are looking for.”
Tony Delgado, a director of voter contact at the company, noted that this service line isn’t just about fundraising, a TLC speciality.
“We also have an advocacy side helping out some associations in terms of how they reach out to Hispanic coalition members,” he said. “But we’ll also look at this from a voter contact perspective in different mediums and channels.”
Delgado added: “There will be a fundraising component to it, and we’re going to work with our nonprofit side on how to maximize that.”
Delgado noted that TLC has been offering some Spanish-language services for years, but is combining its offerings into a type of sub-shingle led by Yordi.
“We’ve done some Hispanic outreach in the past, mostly just kind of translating English mailers into Spanish language mailers,” Delgado said. “I think bringing Alejandro on board a few years ago was kind of the ground zero for this, where we just started brainstorming and figuring out ways we could actually expand this and make this into a larger offering.”
