WASHINGTON — An intense battle for Latino support in this fall's election got underway this week, as President Bush and a Democratic political group launched dueling Spanish-language television advertisements targeting a voting bloc that keeps growing in importance.
On Friday, the New Democrat Network launched a projected $5-million TV campaign with two commercials that promote the party's cause and criticize Bush.
The ads are appearing in Phoenix, Las Vegas and Albuquerque on Univision and Telemundo, the dominant Spanish-language networks, and will debut in Florida after that state's Tuesday primary.
One of the commercials portrays Democrats as friends of the Latino community. The other attacks Bush's record on education. "President Bush, why did you break your promise?" a Spanish-speaking schoolgirl asks, looking directly at the camera, in the latter ad.
The ad claims that the Bush administration has fallen billions of dollars short of an $18-billion annual funding commitment for education of disadvantaged schoolchildren. That commitment was part of the No Child Left Behind school reform law enacted in 2002.
Republicans say Bush has presided over historic increases in federal education spending and deny that the law has been underfunded. Christine Iverson, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, noted that Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, the presumptive Democratic nominee, voted for the reform law.
The Bush reelection campaign unveiled a Spanish-language ad on Thursday. Replicating a spot produced in English, the 30-second commercial asserts that Bush has helped improve the economy and shows images of the wreckage at the World Trade Center following the 2001 terrorist attacks. It went on the air in Las Vegas, Albuquerque, Miami, Orlando, Tampa, Phoenix and Tucson, according to Democratic and independent media monitors.
The budding ad war on Spanish-language outlets reflects the electoral math of a sharply divided country. New Mexico, Nevada and Florida were all closely fought in the 2000 presidential election. Bush won the latter two and barely lost the first.
In each of these states, there are growing numbers of Latino voters whose party allegiance is thought to be in flux. Arizona, experiencing similar demographic changes, is another state Democrats hope to wrest from Bush.
