As Vice President Kamala Harris fights to keep her advantage with Latino voters as large as possible, the campaign thinks they’ve found a potent message: former President Donald Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 insurrection.
In the past week, Harris’ campaign has released two TV ads featuring former Capitol Police officer Aquilino Gonell talking about fighting Donald Trump’s mob on Jan. 6, 2021.
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“An out-of-control president, trying to steal an election he lost by millions of votes,” Gonell says in a spot released Friday, which shows pictures and videos of the rioters attacking the Capitol.
“I fought and nearly died that day, supporting and defending the Constitution of the United States, and I would do it again because that is the oath that I took,” Gonell says. “So help me god.”
In a second ad unveiled on Wednesday, with both English and Spanish versions, Gonell says he defended the Capitol, “But now we all must defend democracy with our vote.”
The Harris campaign believes Trump’s insurrection is a key vulnerability for the former president with Latino voters and that Gonell, who was born in the Dominican Republic before becoming an American citizen, Iraq War veteran and Capitol Police officer, is an excellent messenger on the topic. The campaign said the ad would air in battleground states on high-viewership programs in markets that reach Latino voters, including during World Series games and on Univision and Telemundo.
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Latino voters favor Harris by wide margins but polls suggest Trump has had some success cracking her coalition, with Latino support for Harris steadily eroding from levels enjoyed by previous Democratic presidential nominees. Large-scale polls of Latino voters suggest Trump may make minor gains with the group, rather than the significant gains he made from 2016 to 2020.
In a memo accompanying the first Gonell ad, the Harris campaign said their internal polling suggests emphasizing Jan. 6 “is among the most persuadable messages” to Latino voters.
Public polling backs up the claim that Latino voters don’t like Trump’s Jan. 6 riot. In an August survey of 3,000 Latino voters by UnidosUS, a civil rights advocacy group, 49% of respondents said a candidate having participated in or supported the riot at the Capitol would be a “deal breaker.” No other policy position was nearly as unpopular, not even defunding the police or opposing a higher minimum wage.
Still, the UnidosUS poll found voters most concerned about inflation, jobs and affordable housing, with only 3% of voters saying “democracy” or voting rights were the most important issues.
In focus groups, a campaign official said, Latino voters recoiled at images of Trump supporters attacking the Capitol, a siege that injured dozens of police officers, including Gonell.
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“We would show some of the images and they would be disgusted,” the official said. “And even if they had just been undecided Latino men talking about how Trump was a good businessman, we would talk about Jan. 6 and they would just, they would be disgusted with him, disgusted.”
During a town hall event last week organized by Univision, a former Republican voter named Ramiro Gonzalez asked Trump to win back his vote, saying Trump’s actions had been “disturbing.” Gonzalez cited “what happened during Jan. 6 and the fact that you waited so long to take action while your supporters were attacking the Capitol.” Witnesses have said Trump watched the riot on TV from a White House dining room.
Trump excused the riot, saying his supporters thought the election was rigged and that they did nothing wrong. Hundreds of people have been charged with assaulting or impeding officers; Trump has said he would consider pardoning them all.
“They thought the election was a rigged election and that’s why they came. Some of those people went down to the Capitol, I said, peacefully and patriotically, nothing done wrong at all. Nothing done wrong,” Trump told Gonzalez, before going on to call Jan. 6 a “day of love.”
Afterward, Gonzalez said he wouldn’t vote for Trump.