Latinos in the United States have been described as a sleeping giant in electoral politics because of their relatively low voting rates compared to their share of the population. The electoral significance of this diverse group of Americans is a function not only of its size, but also its concentration in states with large U.S. congressional delegations and correspondingly hefty Electoral College votes. If the giant awakens, the Latino electorate has the potential to become a major influence in national electoral politics. The major parties have taken notice of the demographic trends, and in recent presidential elections they have started to make efforts to court the “Latino vote” (Garcia 2003). Political campaigns utilize a variety of voter outreach strategies, but television advertising has become the most important and ubiquitous technique of political communications in modern political campaigns. Latinos are beginning to figure more prominently in national campaign media strategies (Buehler 1977; Doherty and Cully Anderson 2003; Subervi-Velez and Connaughton 1999), and in the 2000 presidential election over three thousand political advertisements were aired in Spanish.

The development of strategies aimed at Latino voters is still in its infancy, complicated by the newness and diversity of the Latino population in the United States. Indeed, nearly half of Latinos are immigrants whose first language is most likely not English. Furthermore, there is substantial internal ethnic diversity within the Latino category in terms of country of origin.