Democratic Rep. Debbie Mucarsel Powell has launched a text campaign on the messaging app WhatsApp to reach out directly to voters.
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Debbie Mucarsel Powell, former Democratic U.S. House of Representatives member and current challenger Florida Republican Senator Rick Scott Democratic Senate candidate John F. Kennedy has launched a new campaign on WhatsApp to reach out to voters and break through a sea of misinformation.
The direct-messaging tactic is part of a broader effort to close the gap in an increasingly competitive race. Democrats have struggled to undo Republican gains in the state in recent years, especially in an election where former President Donald Trump is expected to boost Republican turnout in the state. But Democrats believe they can turn out more votes through smartphones, especially among Latino voters.
“This is designed specifically to reach out to Latino voters across the state and provide them with accurate, fact-based information straight from the source,” Mucarsel-Powell, the only Latina candidate running for U.S. Senate this year, told NPR.
The messaging campaign will include two channels (English and Spanish) on messaging platform WhatsApp.
This initiative is A similar announcement by Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaignnow has its own bilingual channel to reach Latino voters, a move the Harris campaign said is the first of its kind in a presidential election.
The encrypted platform is a free messaging app popular among immigrants, especially Latinos, for communicating through texts and calls at home and abroad. A growing number of campaigns are considering using the app, hoping that users can share updates to expand their network with voters.
Mucarsel-Powell argues that WhatsApp allows her to reach out directly to Florida’s Hispanic community, which is often targeted by misinformation. Pew Research Report The survey found that 46% of Hispanic Americans use messaging programs, compared with a quarter of Americans, 23% of black Americans and 16% of white Americans.
“Forwarding is so easy, and in fact, this easy forwarding ability is one of the reasons why there is so much misinformation out there,” Mucarsel-Powell said, “so we wanted to have our own channel and allow our supporters to forward contacts to our network across the state.”
Mucarsel-Powell is the first Spanish-speaking Democratic candidate running for the Florida Senate. The WhatsApp effort is part of a campaign strategy to reach out to Latino voters who have not voted in previous elections that has included campaign events and ads in both English and Spanish.
BOLD PAC, the campaign arm of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, has made the Florida Senate race a top target for combating misinformation and reaching out to Hispanic voters. During the last presidential election in 2020, Mucarsel-Powell and others warned lawmakers about the misinformation being spread to voters on WhatsApp and Facebook.
Democrats have long argued that Republicans have encouraged the spread of misinformation through their campaigns, while Republicans have made the exact opposite claim.
Mucarsel-Powell’s campaign faces an uphill battle to unseat Scott, a one-term senator who is seeking reelection after serving as Florida governor.
Florida has become increasingly Republican in recent years, with Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump as its home state, but Democrats say voters are fired up by Harris’ presidential campaign and national issues such as abortion rights that will be on Florida’s November ballot.
