When Yadira Caraveo, a Democratic party member, won the race to represent Colorado’s eighth district in the House of Representatives in 2022, she eked out a victory, winning by the narrowest margin of any Democrat in the country. This November, Caraveo is facing yet another close race – one that could determine the balance of Congress.
In a district where nearly 40% of residents identify as Hispanic or Latino, the community will be decisive in crowning a winner. The battle for their votes is mostly playing out not on TV or in town halls, but on social media and local radio.
“[Latino voters] are listening to social media and the radio,” said Sonny Subia, Colorado’s volunteer state director for Lulac, the League of United Latin American Citizens, the largest and oldest Hispanic organization in the country.
CD-8 stretches from the suburbs of Denver, where voters lean Democratic, to the agricultural areas around Greeley, where voters lean Republican. Caraveo, a pediatrician whose Mexican parents raised their four children in what is now the eighth district, is highlighting her efforts to lower healthcare costs and her ability to work across the aisle to represent a split constituency.
Her Republican challenger, Gabe Evens, is also Latino. Evans is campaigning on his experience as a farmer and his background in law enforcement and the military, sharing how his Mexican grandfather received two Purple Hearts in the second world war.
In CD-8, “people aren’t just one-sided”, said Angel Merlos, strategic director in Colorado of the Libre Initiative, a conservative organization that mobilizes the Hispanic vote around principles of limited government. “You have to make your case as to why you want their vote.”
In a race that close, the battle for votes can be fierce. And voting rights groups have been sounding the alarm about disinformation targeting Latinos in the US. In September, the US justice department intervened in operations by Russian state media to spread disinformation about the general election to US audiences, including citizens “of Hispanic descent”.
Roughly one in five Latinos prefers to get news from social media, where misinformation has found fertile ground. The key to the potency of mis- and disinformation in 2024 is how much cheaper and easier it is for lies to proliferate on social media platforms that enhance engaging material, said Laura Zommer, CEO and co-founder of Factchequeado, a Spanish-language factchecking organization.
Spanish-language radio, too, has at times been a source of misleading and inaccurate information, repeating and reinforcing false narratives that are circulating in the wider information ecosystem. Nearly half of Latinos tune into the radio for news, and Latino immigrants are much more likely than U.S.-born Latinos to say they mainly consume news in Spanish.
A 2024 study from the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas found that Latinos are not necessarily more vulnerable to misinformation than the rest of the population. But, the authors concluded, there is a need for culturally competent information, especially targeting more susceptible subgroups including Latinos who are Spanish-dominant and consume more broadcast news and Spanish-language media.
In CD-8, a program that compares radio recordings against thousands of factchecked statements from respected organizations identified only a few instances of potential misinformation in a week’s worth of recording nine local Spanish-language stations.
For example, on a Monday evening at the end of October on KNRV a news bulletin inaccurately stated that Donald Trump was leading in national polls by nearly 8%, when most polls that day showed Harris in the lead by nearly 2 points. The station advertises that it rents air space to a variety of programs and hosts; this evening news segment came from the Mexican radio network Radio Formula.
An ad in another news segment incorrectly cited a recent poll from the Colorado Health Foundation that asked respondents about their major concerns. The ad exaggerated how many Latino respondents expressed extreme worry about not being able to feed their families in the next year.
Disinformation uses “content that activates our ire, our grievances, sometimes an incredible hope”, said Zommer. Sometimes the goal is to persuade someone of a lie, and sometimes it can be to sow doubt and mistrust or divide people. “Many times the most successful disinformation has an element of truth and it’s taken out of context, or it has an element of truth and it’s exaggerated,” she said.
Conversations heard on the radio in CD-8 reflect heightened tensions around immigration in the local Latino community. Stacy Suniga, president of the Latino Coalition of Weld county said Latinos in her district are hearing more insults in public places like grocery stores. “I think there are issues on top of their issues, with the radical display of racism,” she said.
In some instances, the tension is between Latinos. Merlos said Latinos are complaining to Libre organizers about Venezuelan immigrants getting what they see as preferential treatment from the government. On a midday program in mid-October KNRV, a caller expressed frustration with how Denver, like Chicago and New York, had deployed city resources to help newly arrived Venezuelans. “I’m going to go with Trump although he’s not someone I consider a good person,” he said, “but I’m against Biden’s party for what he’s done at the border.”
This could be part of a misleading narrative using the arrival of Venezuelan immigrants to drive a wedge between voters. Zommer highlighted the power of “fragmenting, dividing, between whites and Latinos, but also between Latinos: Latinos living, working, paying taxes – and the new Latinos.”
Callers and guests are often a source of misleading and inaccurate claims that air on the radio. A 2021 report that analyzed disinformation about January 6 on four Spanish-language radio stations in south Florida found that hosts play an important role in contextualizing and correcting callers on the air. It’s important, as well, for stations to clearly distinguish between news segments and programs that air opinions or commentary.
On KNRV, the host immediately jumped in, correcting the caller’s belief that the southern border is “open”, explaining that Venezuelans received political asylum for the crisis happening in their country, and insisting that while it felt unfair, Latinos should not let this issue divide them.
For Zommer, this conflict is part of a wider disinformation narrative in effect updating “the big lie”, or the baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen, for 2024: that the Biden administration has allowed for an open southern border so immigrants can cross and vote in the election. “In this new narrative of disinformation, there is no way to factcheck it because it’s what they’re saying is going to happen in the future.”
Jordan Rynning contributed reporting
