The Kamala Harris presidential campaign launched a WhatsApp channel Monday in an explicit effort to reach Latino voters. The WhatsApp channel is a first for a U.S. presidential campaign and it’s just the latest way that the Harris campaign is engaging potential voters across a wide swath of social media platforms, including TikTok, an app where vice presidential candidate Tim Walz just recently created a new account.
The Harris campaign called the new WhatsApp channel a “novel way to reach and mobilize voters in an increasingly dynamic and fragmented media environment,” while also noting how hostile Republican candidate Donald Trump is to the Latino community. Trump, an adjudicated rapist and generally awful human being, infamously started his journey to the presidency in 2015 by slandering the Latino community and calling Mexicans rapists.
WhatsApp, which is owned by Meta, has almost 100 million users in the U.S. but often fails to get the kind of media attention in America that competitors like Facebook and Instagram (also both owned by Meta) regularly get.
Trump is currently polling much more poorly against Harris than he was against Joe Biden, who dropped out of the race on July 21. FiveThirtyEight’s polling average currently has Harris at 46.7% and Trump at 43.8% with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. scoring 4.9% of the vote nationally. But the Electoral College system makes the national polls practically irrelevant, meaning that battleground states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania are absolutely crucial. Harris has a slight lead in those states at the moment, with Harris leading in all three states by 4 points, according to recent polling from the New York Times.
Trump has struggled to overcome the impression that Harris and Walz are a generational shift offering voters a vision of hope for the future, while he’s stuck whining about the past and giving nothing but a bleak neo-fascist alternative that few Americans actually want. That contrast in tone is incredibly evident in the way Harris has embraced social media, creating videos on YouTube, for instance, that include a 10-minute chat between Harris and Walz about music, food, and their vision for tomorrow.
The recent talk of food was particularly triggering for some MAGA assholes, as Walz joked that he couldn’t handle spicy dishes. The Minnesota governor and vice presidential candidate said he made “white guy tacos,” which the absolutely lamest people on X jump on to declare Walz was actually being racist for joking about his own food preferences. And that tone is just going to continue to alienate normal people, as guys like JD Vance keep making it weird.
The Harris campaign made quite the impression at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Monday, with President Biden delivering a speech in support of his vice president. The second day of the convention continues tonight, and the Harris campaign clearly knows what they’re doing when it comes to outreach.
“The Harris-Walz campaign continues to expand the number of ways we talk to voters and the launch of the Latinos con Harris-Walz WhatsApp channel underscores our commitment to engaging in substantive conversations with Latino voters about the stakes of this election,” Harris-Walz Hispanic Media Director Maca Casado said in an emailed statement.
“While Donald Trump vilifies our community at every turn and uses us as a political punching bag, Vice President Harris and Governor Walz know the power of our community and are fighting everyday on the issues that matter to Latino voters,” Casado continued. “Now more than ever, we must meet Latinos where they are, and creative programs like this WhatsApp channel are how this campaign will reach the voters who will decide this election and win in November.”
