Buzzfeed
By Adrian Carrasquillo
August 12, 2015
Hillary
Clinton has hired an experienced operative to lead Hispanic media for
her campaign, adding Harry Reid’s senior adviser for Latino media, Jorge
Silva, the campaign
has confirmed.
Silva,
who starts on Monday, is the latest example of the campaign’s focus on
bringing on Hispanic staffers and gives it a deeply experienced team in
the crucial swing
state of Nevada.
He
developed and implemented Hispanic media strategy in states like
Colorado, New Mexico, and some parts of California, in addition to
Nevada, as the senior strategist
for the Senate Democratic Caucus.
Nathaly
Arriola, who worked with Silva under Reid and served on Obama’s
Hispanic media team during his reelection campaign, said he has been
behind the scenes for every
major push the Democratic Party has engaged in when it comes to the
Latino community during the last four to five years.
She
said the Obama campaign modeled their Hispanic strategy after Reid’s
successful 2010 reelection with a focus on regional and
district-specific approaches to Latino
media — something the sprawling Clinton operation can make use of.
“In
a campaign full of spokespeople, in a well-established operation, you
don’t need another spokesperson,” she said. “You need someone to run the
operation and make sure
folks in the states are being heard.”
The
addition of Silva now gives Clinton’s campaign a strong team in Nevada,
as he joins state director Emmy Ruiz and organizing director Jorge
Neri, who both had the same
roles in 2012 for Obama helping him garner 70% of the Latino vote in
the crucial swing state.
The
key to Silva’s strategy with Reid was to identify the regional news
organizations and newspapers and engage them, give them content, and
provide access to Reid.
A
source with knowledge of Silva’s approach said the way this could work
for Clinton is bringing her message to the Hispanic community, but
tweaking it if a small community
is more interested in one issue over another.
Silva
also played a big role for Reid on another issue that has flummoxed and
mobilized Democrats of late: how to deal with the LIBRE Initiative, a
Latino conservative
organization financially backed by the billionaire Koch brothers.
Because
Silva was monitoring local Spanish-language newspapers, he noticed that
LIBRE was doing small community events that no one else knew were
happening. He flagged
this up the chain in early 2012, before LIBRE would become well-known
in the Democratic Party, and soon enough, Reid was thundering about the
Koch brothers trying to infiltrate the Latino community on the Senate
floor.
When
the retiring Reid found out about Silva joining the Clinton campaign,
he said it was a big deal, a source said, seeing it as another way of
continuing his legacy
of grooming Latino operatives.
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