Univision Aims to Make Hispanic Voting Bloc Even More Formidable

Univision, including its top-rated Spanish-language network and many subsidiaries, is making an ambitious nationwide effort aimed at registering about three million new Latino voters in 2016, roughly the same number who have come of voting age since 2012. The initiative will entail an aggressive schedule of advertisements on all of Univision’s video and digital platforms, including 126 local television and radio stations and the sports channel Univision Deportes. Station managers will exhort their audiences in old-fashioned editorials, a comprehensive online voter guide will be updated throughout the election season, and the media company will use the kinds of grass-roots organizing events usually staged by candidates — town-hall-style forums and telephone banks — to try to turn its viewers into even more of a powerhouse voting bloc than it already is.

For Univision, the voter drive on all cylinders sums up what sets it apart from the nation’s biggest English-language television networks, whose ratings it has frequently surpassed in recent years. Its mission is not only to inform and entertain, but also to “empower the Hispanic community.” And as that community shares a language but not necessarily an ethnicity or national origin, empowerment means serving as a unifying voice and a mobilizing, galvanizing force.