June 11, 2012

Obama Super-PAC and National Union Unveil $4 Million Spanish-Language Ad Blitz

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/barackobamadotcom/5655674841/">Barack Obama</a>/Flickr

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Hispanic voters are crucial to President Barack Obama’s bid to win a second term in office this November. To bolster the president’s Latino base, the pro-Obama super-PAC Priorities USA Action and Service Employees International Union on Monday launched a $4 million Spanish-language ad campaign in Colorado, Florida, and Nevada slamming GOP nominee Mitt Romney.

Priorities and SEIU unveiled a different TV ad for each state, though each are titled “Mitt Romney: En sus propias palabras” (Mitt Romney: In his own words). The ads pluck out quotes of Romney’s—”You can focus on the very poor; that’s not my focus”; “I’m also unemployed”; “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me”—then show Hispanic men and women reacting negatively to Romney’s remarks. “What about us? He’s not thinking about us,” one woman remarks. “He is…just thinking about those that have made money already,” says another woman. The ads end with the message: “Mitt Romney: His words say it all.”

Here are the three Priorities-SEIU ads:

Florida:

Colorado:

Nevada:

The Priorities-SEIU ad blitz comes as GOP-friendly super-PACs and shadowy nonprofits are spending tens of millions attacking Obama. A month ago, Crossroads GPS, founded by GOP political gurus Ed Gillespie and Karl Rove, announced plans to spend $25 million on a monthlong ad blitz in 10 battleground states.

Priorities has struggled to keep pace in spending with other candidate-specific super-PACs. The pro-Romney super-PAC Restore Our Future, which is run by Romney’s former political director Carl Forti, has spent $46.5 million so far this election cycle. Even the now-dormant Winning Our Future super-PAC, devoted to electing Newt Gingrich before he dropped out of the race in early May, spent $17 million.

The Priorities-SEIU ads are attempt to define Romney as someone who won’t work in Latinos’ best interests. “This ad is part of a broader effort to ensure Latino voters know the stakes in this election and who has been on the side of Latino families and who will continue to stand with them in the coming years,” SEIU national political director Brandon Davis said in a statement.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate