Mitt Romney and the Republican National Committee attack President Obama on jobs and the national debt in a new Spanish-language ad, the second in less than a week focused on winning over Hispanic voters.
"Obama and his Democratic allies — their great achievement: a $16 trillion debt. To pay for it, our children will owe more than $50,000," the ad's narrator says in Spanish. "The policy of Obama and the Democrats has meant that half of our young people are struggling to find work when they graduate. The legacy to our children: a debt they don't deserve, without the jobs to pay for it."
Romney has been ramping up his Spanish-language advertising presence in recent weeks,
spending $3.2 million since the Republican National Convention. Though Obama's campaign spent twice that amount on Spanish-language ads during that period, it's a big shift from the 12-to-1 spending edge Obama had in Spanish-language media over the summer. Late last week the campaign launched a Spanish-language ad featuring Puerto Rico Gov. Luis Fortuno (R), and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has been both in ads and on the trail in recent weeks.
It's unclear how much this push has helped, however. While a six-week average of tracking polls released Monday showed Romney trailing Obama by 61 to 33 percent in the swing states, he'd actually lost ground to Obama nationally during those weeks, dropping from a 65-26 percent deficit six weeks ago to a 73-21 percent deficit this week. Romney's campaign told The Hill earlier this summer that its goal was to win 38 percent of Hispanic voters nationwide.
Latino voters are especially important in Florida, where large populations of Republican-leaning Cuban Americans as well as Democratic-leaning Puerto Ricans and Dominican-Americans reside. Other states where Latino voters could make the difference include Nevada and Colorado, where the mostly Mexican-American populations lean Democratic.
