Democrats launch text message campaign in Florida Senate race to reach Latino voters

Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, the former U.S. House Democrat who is now challenging Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott for the Senate, has launched a new WhatsApp campaign to reach voters and tackle a sea of misinformation.

The direct-messaging operation is part of a broader attempt to close the gap in an increasingly tight race. Democrats face an uphill battle to reverse Republican gains in the state in recent years, especially in an election where former President Trump is expected to boost GOP turnout in the state. But Democrats believe they can make a difference, particularly with Latino voters, using smartphones.

“It was specifically created to target Latino voters across the state to provide them with accurate, factual information straight from the source,” Mucarsel-Powell, the only Latino candidate running for U.S. Senate this year, told NPR.

The Scott campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The messaging campaign includes two channels on the WhatsApp messaging platform: one in English and another in Spanish.

The move also coincides with the launch of a similar campaign by Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, which now has its own bilingual channel to reach Latino voters. In her case, Harris’ campaign said it was a first in a presidential election.

The encrypted platform is a free messaging app that is especially popular among immigrants, especially Latinos, to communicate via text messages and calls nationally and internationally. As election campaigns increasingly look to use the app, they hope their network will grow with voters as users share updates.

Mucarsel-Powell says WhatsApp will allow it to directly reach Florida’s Hispanic community, which is often a target of misinformation. A Pew Research report found that 46% of Hispanic Americans use the messaging program, compared with a quarter of Americans. It is used by 23% of black Americans and 16% of white Americans, the group found.

“It’s very easy to forward messages, and that’s actually one of the reasons why there’s been so much misinformation, because of that easy feature, the easy forward feature,” Mucarsel-Powell said. “So we wanted to have our own channels to allow our own supporters to just forward the contact to their networks across the state.”

Mucarsel-Powell is the first Spanish-speaking Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Florida. And the WhatsApp initiative is part of a broader campaign strategy to reach Latino voters who didn’t participate in previous elections, which has included dozens of campaign events in English and Spanish so far as well as ads in both languages.

BOLD PAC, the campaign arm of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, has identified the Florida Senate race as a prime target to combat misinformation and reach Latino voters. During the last presidential election in 2020, Mucarsel-Powell and others sounded the alarm to members of Congress about misinformation on WhatsApp and Facebook reaching voters.

Democrats have long claimed that Republicans helped spread disinformation through their campaigns, while Republicans argue the opposite.

Mucarsel-Powell’s campaign faces a daunting challenge: unseating Scott, the first-term senator now seeking reelection after serving as governor of Florida.

Florida, now home to Republican presidential nominee and former President Donald Trump, has largely turned red in recent years. But Democrats say their voters have been energized by Harris’ presidential campaign and by national issues, such as abortion access, which will be on the Florida ballot in November.