A Halftime Pitch During the World Cup
Most campaigns don't spend money on soccer halftime. In June, Texas Democrat James Talarico did exactly that, putting more than $800,000 into a Spanish-language ad that ran on Telemundo during every U.S. and Mexico group-stage match of the FIFA World Cup — timed to reach the tournament's largest audiences in Texas. The buy, first reported by the Texas Tribune, marked the first television advertisement of the general election from either Senate campaign, arriving nearly five months before Election Day.
The 30-second spot walks through Talarico's résumé as a former public school teacher, his commitments to protect Social Security and Medicare, and his push to raise taxes on billionaires, all set against footage of him spending time in Latino communities. It closes with a crowd chanting his name. According to the Bulwark, the ad aired during Telemundo's coverage of a U.S. rout of Paraguay, sandwiched between play-by-play commentary and crowd noise from a 91,000-person crowd watching nearby at Texas A&M's Kyle Field.
Why Telemundo, Why Now
Three things make this buy notable beyond its price tag. The first is timing: Texas soccer viewership skews heavily Latino, and a World Cup hosted partly in Houston offered a concentrated audience no ordinary ad schedule could match. The second is money — Talarico has out-fundraised Republican nominee Ken Paxton by roughly five to one, pulling in over $40 million to Paxton's approximately $7.6 million, according to Ballotpedia's latest tally, a gap that makes a six-figure early buy on Spanish-language TV possible in the first place.
The third is continuity. This isn't Talarico's first outreach effort in Spanish — it's an extension of one. During his primary campaign against Rep. Jasmine Crockett, Talarico ran Spanish-language ads during major soccer broadcasts and the Premio Lo Nuestro music awards, campaigned alongside Tejano singer Bobby Pulido, and partnered with content creator Carlos Eduardo Espina, according to reporting from the Latin Times. Chuck Rocha, a senior Talarico adviser who has worked on Latino outreach since the Ann Richards governorship in the 1990s, told the Bulwark it was the earliest he'd personally seen a general-election candidate invest in Spanish-language television since those early years of his career.
The Numbers Behind the Bet
The strategy targets a specific gap Democrats are trying to close. Latino voters made up nearly a quarter of the ballots cast in Texas in 2024, according to VoteHub estimates cited by KERA News — and that cycle saw a real rightward shift among them, part of a broader national trend in which Donald Trump's share of the Hispanic vote climbed from 32% in 2020 to 46% in 2024, per analysis shared with ABC News. Talarico's early, heavy investment in Spanish-language media is a wager that some of that shift can be undone — and that reaching voters before the fall's advertising crush, in their own language, is how to do it.
Talarico has tied the effort to a specific figure: nearly 8 million Texans speak Spanish, out of 31 million residents statewide, and he has said he intends to campaign for all of them rather than only the portion visible in English-language polling.
A Polling Snapshot That Cuts Both Ways
Whether any of this is moving the needle depends heavily on which poll you read. A Texas A&M University/Siena Research Institute/ReconMR survey conducted June 1–4 found Talarico ahead of Paxton among Hispanic voters by 12 points, and a New York Times/Siena poll fielded June 19–27 — rated the most accurate pollster of the last cycle — put that lead at 32 points, 61% to 29%, according to the Hill's coverage of the survey.
But that's not the full picture. A Texas Public Opinion Research poll conducted May 27–28 — before the World Cup ad ran — found the opposite: Paxton actually ahead among Latino voters by 4 points, 46% to 42%, a result that fell within the poll's margin of error but nonetheless complicates any tidy narrative of a Latino swing back toward Talarico. That survey is publicly available and worth weighing alongside the more favorable numbers. The honest takeaway is that Hispanic-vote polling in this race spans a genuinely wide range — from a narrow Paxton edge to a commanding Talarico lead — and no single figure should be treated as the last word this far from November.
The TikTok Content Creator Behind the Curtain
If the World Cup ad is the paid half of Talarico's Latino outreach, the unpaid half runs through TikTok — and no name comes up more than Carlos Eduardo Espina. The 27-year-old, Houston-based creator has built an audience approaching 20 million across TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook, according to ABC News, up from roughly 14 million as recently as February.
Espina's biography is itself a window into how Spanish-language political media has evolved. Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, to a Uruguayan father and a Mexican mother, he moved to the College Station area of Central Texas as a child and later studied political science at Vassar College, according to Vassar's own profile of him. He began posting Spanish-language explainer videos in 2020, and his first video to go viral was a straightforward walkthrough of the U.S. citizenship test. Since then, his account has functioned less like a typical political commentary channel and more like an informal community hotline — followers reach out to him for help with immigration paperwork, bond payments, and medical emergencies as often as they do for political takes.
That trust has made him a sought-after figure well beyond Texas. Espina delivered a speech at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, was summoned separately by then-Vice President Kamala Harris and President Biden in 2024, and was named by Pew Research Center as one of the handful of influencers Americans most often cite as a news source — a list otherwise dominated by longer-established conservative commentators like Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson. In March, Espina joined Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego on a trip to San Antonio to film content specifically about the Texas Senate race and the weight of the Latino vote, according to ABC News — though the exact date relative to Talarico's nomination isn't specified in that reporting.
Fifty Voices and Counting: Inside RUIDO
Espina isn't operating alone, and that's arguably the more structurally significant part of the story. In February 2026, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus's campaign arm, BOLD PAC, launched a program called RUIDO — Spanish for "noise" — built around a growing roster of Latino content creators. It started with roughly 50 creators, according to BOLD PAC's own announcement, recruited to weave political messaging into everyday content — get-ready-with-me videos, food posts, casual mentions of upcoming elections — rather than deliver scripted campaign talking points.
One Houston creator in the network, Carlos Castillo, described the logic behind it to the Associated Press: "People are going to act more when they hear from a family member" than from a traditional ad. The approach is explicitly modeled on lessons Democrats say they absorbed too late from the right's investment in podcasts and alternative media ahead of the 2024 election. Rocha, for his part, has attributed much of Talarico's primary-season success with Latino voters to a message centered on "faith and family and jobs and bringing people together," as he told the Wall Street Journal, reported by Latin Times.
The Limits of Influencer Politics
Researchers who study Latino media have been careful to flag the limits of this approach. One influencer, however large his following, isn't a substitute for a sustained institutional presence, and Democrats remain widely seen as behind Republican-aligned media in reaching Latino audiences at scale. UCLA political scientist Matt Barreto, who ran polling for the 2024 Harris-Walz campaign, told ABC News that Spanish-language disinformation has proliferated even as trusted figures like Espina have emerged to counter it — but cautioned that no single creator can carry that weight alone. Espina himself has pushed back on the idea that he's "the solution," framing his role as one voice among many still needed in the space, and he's collaborated with Republicans too, including a video with Florida Rep. María Elvira Salazar on a bipartisan immigration proposal.
Where the Race Stands Now
None of this guarantees anything in November. The overall race is close to a dead heat — a New York Times/Siena poll had the two candidates tied at 47% apiece in late June — but Paxton still holds a modest edge in most forward-looking assessments. The Cook Political Report shifted its rating from "Likely Republican" to "Lean Republican" after Paxton's May primary runoff win, according to the Hill, while betting markets have been similarly cautious: as of mid-June, Polymarket traders priced Paxton's odds of winning at roughly 55%, against 44% for Talarico.
Taken together, the World Cup ad buy and the RUIDO-style creator network represent the most sustained, best-funded attempt by a Texas Democrat in a generation to meet Latino voters where they actually spend their time — Spanish-language television during the year's biggest sporting event, and TikTok the rest of the year — rather than relying on outreach methods that worked a decade ago. Whether it's enough to flip a state Democrats haven't carried statewide since 1988 is a question the fall campaign, not the spring polling, will actually answer.
