Texas candidates have targeted the state’s Latino population earlier and more intensely this election cycle, signaling how critical the bloc is to both parties amid critical races along the border and beyond, a panel of analysts said Saturday during The Texas Tribune Festival.

“You’re seeing state candidates do a much better job putting media in the ether earlier and being consistent about that,” Jason Villalba, head of the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation and a former Republican state representative, said.

During the World Cup, which took place in the U.S. this summer, Democratic U.S. Senate nominee James Talarico spent $800,000 on a Spanish-language ad campaign, Villalba pointed out, which ran on Telemundo during U.S. and Mexico group stage matches. Talarico’s opponent, Republican nominee Ken Paxton, also has targeted Latino voters, running ads in Spanish and in Spanish-accented English.

With an estimated 25% of Texas voters in the coming election being Latino, candidates need to start taking Latino voters more seriously, the panelists explained.

That’s especially true in South Texas, where candidates in tight congressional races will need to demonstrate they care about the issues that matter to Latino voters.

“Latinos don’t want to be invited to the kiddy table anymore,” Sergio García-Ríos, a political scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. “They want to hear that the campaign is embracing Latino issues.”

Spanish-language ads are a way for politicians to show they care about the community, Villalba said.

Still, while running ads in the language of the target demographic can help build trust, panelist Stephanie Valencia, president of the Latino research firm Equis, warned that simply running Latino-coded ads might not be enough to convince voters.

“Voters are smart,” she said. “They’re like, ‘don’t try to pull the wool over my eyes by doing something in Spanish.’”

Immigration and deportation were the second-most important issue in September, per recent polling, Valencia said. With immigration crackdowns fueling distrust of the Republican Party, the voting bloc is very much in play despite its rightward shift in 2024.

At the same time, past immigration-policy missteps by both parties mean that “there is a fundamental mistrust of all parties,” Valencia explained. As a result of those missteps, as well as Latinos’ historic tendency to vote for candidates rather than parties, candidates will have to appeal to the powerful voting bloc as individuals, panelists said.

“Latinos are no longer a sleeping giant … We are the swinging giant,” Valencia said. “And we will be the swinging giant for the foreseeable future.”

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