S.A. consultant helped pull off Georgia upset

It’s a given in Texas politics that Latino voters have the power to make or break campaigns.

We don’t generally hear too much, however, about the impact of the Latino vote in Georgia.

Nonetheless, Latinos make up nearly 10 percent of the Georgia population, and they were semisecret weapons Tuesday in Georgia’s two U.S. Senate runoffs, both of which went to the Democratic challengers in upset fashion.

Those victories carried serious historical weight.

The Rev. Raphael Warnock became the first African American senator in the history of his state. Jon Ossoff, a documentary film executive and former congressional aide, became, at 33, the youngest person elected to the U.S. Senate since a brash Delaware attorney named Joe Biden won his 1972 race a couple of weeks before his 30th birthday.

By flipping two Republican seats, Warnock and Ossoff also enabled the Democratic Party to take back majority control of the Senate after six years of GOP domination.

In addition, the two Georgia races instantly altered Biden’s prospects for legislative success in the first two years of his presidency.

Laura Barberena helped make it happen.

Barberena, a San Antonio Democratic consultant, specializes in the art of campaign messaging, and she assumed a key role in Ossoff’s bid to engage and motivate Georgia Latinos.

Barberena was enlisted by Adrian Saenz, a University of Texas at San Antonio alum who served as special assistant to former President Barack Obama and will soon be Biden’s deputy director of the Office of Public Engagement.

Ossoff’s media firm subcontracted Saenz and Barberena to handle Latino outreach. Saenz and Barberena co-wrote a series of Spanish-language and bilingual radio and TV ads for the candidate, with Barberena as director.

In a nod to the public-health threat posed by the pandemic, she worked virtually, choreographing the Georgia action behind a laptop in San Antonio.

“We did polling, so we were driven by polls,” Barberena said. “We did several phone calls where we were asking what the most important issues were and what was resonating with Latino voters.”

The polling determined that three issues particularly connected with Georgia Latinos: the pandemic, concerns about jobs and President Donald Trump’s 2018 policy of separating children from parents at the U.S.-Mexico border.

“I really wanted to talk about how what (Trump) was doing with these children was not just wrong, it was morally wrong,” Barberena said. “I thought, ‘Let’s have a conversation on morality.’”

Ossoff prevailed over Republican Sen. David Perdue by roughly 50,000 votes, a margin that would have been impossible without a strong Latino turnout.

Ordinarily, a runoff election in January of an odd-numbered year, with only two races on the ballot, would have produced a lackluster turnout.

About 4.5 million people turned out for the Georgia runoffs, however, and 65 percent of the Latinos who voted early in the November general election also voted early in the runoff.

Bernard Fraga, an associate professor of politics at Emory University, said last week: “This is the highest turnout there will ever be for Latinos in a runoff.”

Fraga credited the “tremendous efforts to mobilize Latino voters” across the state.

Those efforts included campaign appearances fromformer San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro on behalf of Warnock and Ossoff.

Barberena’s ads were just one piece of that mobilization push, but an important piece.

Barberena entered the campaign knowing that Ossoff’s wife, Dr. Alisha Kramer, spoke Spanish.

The first ad that Barberena handled for the campaign was a general-election radio spot starring Kramer. But Barberena was surprised when Ossoff delivered his obligatory I-approved-this-message statement for the end of the ad.

He delivered it smoothly in

Spanish, with a flawless accent.

“He read it and I said, ‘Wow!’” Barberena recalled. “He said, ‘What? Do I sound like a gringo?’ I said, ‘No, you sound really good.’”

After Ossoff made it to the runoff, Barberena and Saenz decided they needed to start featuring him in their spots.

“His Spanish is actually very good,” she said. “And the thing about Jon is that you could tell it was important to him. It wasn’t an afterthought. He didn’t want to rush it. He wanted tomake sure it was right.”

For one ad, Ossoff spontaneously decided to mention that his Australian-born mother was an immigrant. Without any help, he knew how to say it in Spanish.

“He was such a delight,” Barberena said. “You knew that he really cared about doing it right to reach out to the Latino community.

“That’s what I felt good about. I felt like I was able to put my finger on the scale to help. Of course, I’m not going to discount any of the hard work that people did on the ground. But you need all these forces working in tandem tomake the difference.”