Can AI Help Campaigns Reach Latino Voters?
For Adrian Saenz, the tendency among political professionals to treat Latinos as a singular voter bloc is a sore spot. Campaigns will acknowledge the nuances and complexities of Latino voters, he said, but they too often fail to prioritize those differences.
“The truth is that, still today, we see too many campaigns – whether it’s electoral or advocacy campaigns – defaulting back to how we treated that subgroup, even before we all acknowledged that it wasn’t a monolith,” said Saenz, a partner at Democratic creative and media firm Conexión and a former Biden administration official.
“The Latino program is still too often ancillary or secondary or the last thing to be considered as you’re building out what would be your general market paid media program, for example,” he added.
In a new push to help campaigns and organizations better engage Latino voters, Conexión is launching a partnership with advertising platform Mundial Media. The goal: to layer Conexión’s creative and political strategy with Mundial’s audience intelligence and AI capabilities to help clients better understand and connect with Latino communities across the country.
“From our perspective, we’re coming to the market with the same intention and trying to break apart that monolith idea,’ Mundial’s CEO and co-founder Tony Gonzalez said. “We do that on the commercial side at scale…and now with the partnership with Conexión, we’re able to do that for campaigns and advocacy-type work.”
The partnership comes at a critical time for Democrats. The party long dominated among the country’s Latino communities – with some exceptions – until 2024, when President Donald Trump won a striking 48 percent of the Latino vote. Now, seeking to recapture control of Congress, Democrats are hoping that they can reverse the GOP’s gains among Latinos, who make up an increasing share of the U.S. electorate.
The odds appear to be in their favor. A New York Times/Siena University poll released this month found that 66 percent of Hispanic voters disapprove of Trump’s performance in the White House, while 78 percent said they would prefer to see the Democratic Party control Congress. Another poll from Hart Research and TelevisaUnivision found Democrats leading Republicans 58 percent to 35 percent on the generic congressional ballot among Latino voters in 17 competitive House districts.
But Saenz warned against taking those voters for granted. For many campaigns, he said, the conversation about Latino voters often defaults simply to Spanish-language media. And while there’s “obviously still a big need” for that, he added, “it’s not a comprehensive or holistic approach to Latino voters anymore.”
The idea behind Conexión’s partnership with Mundial is to provide campaigns and organizations with better intelligence. Mundial’s in-house AI targeting tool Cadmus AI analyzes billions of signals from digital publishers and creators to identify what resonates with audiences. Saenz said that his firm isn’t integrating AI into its day-to-day creative work and development, but rather to use those reports to inform and sharpen communications strategies.
“It’s more about how do you reach Latinos?” Saenz said. “I think that’s where Tony and Mundial really help us. How do we reach those folks where they are, with the message that we know they’re going to be responsive to?”
“We know how to make the creative and what that message should be,” he added. “But how do we go communicate that in a way that isn’t just broad broadcast? And I think with Tony and Mundial and the tools they’ve developed, we are getting much, much better at being able to speak to those various communities.”
The partnership isn’t just a short-term experiment. As Gonzalez put it, his firm “is in this audience for the long haul.”
“Just if you think about economic activity, the population and political activity, the population is durable and it will only continue to grow, and we’re thinking of it as a place we want to be in the long term,” Gonzalez said.
