Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign released a new ad on Thursday aimed at winning over Puerto Rican and other Latino voters by reminding them that a comedian at a Trump rally dismissed Puerto Rico as an “island of garbage.”
The ad, titled “Somos Más,” or “We Are More,” is narrated in Spanish by a man with a Puerto Rican accent using Puerto Rican colloquialisms. The narrator directly addresses the “island of garbage” comment, which the comic, Tony Hinchcliffe, made on Sunday as part of a warm-up act for former President Donald J. Trump at Madison Square Garden in New York.
“We’re not trash, we’re more,” he says, adding, “On Nov. 5, Trump will understand that some people’s trash is others’ treasure.”
The spot is part of a $370 million ad buy, according to the Harris campaign. It is aimed at Latinos in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, which has a sizable Puerto Rican population.
The ad will air during popular telenovelas on the major U.S. Spanish-language broadcast networks Univision and Telemundo, as well as WAPA, a Puerto Rican network carried by many U.S. cable providers. It will also be featured on digital platforms such as YouTube, Snapchat and the website of El Nuevo Día, Puerto Rico’s largest daily newspaper, which endorsed Ms. Harris on Tuesday.
In addition to featuring notable Puerto Ricans, the ad includes a snippet of sound from street protests on the island. The chant — “Somos más, y no tenemos miedo,” or “We are more, and we are not scared” — was popular during the summer of 2019, when huge street protests led to the resignation of Gov. Ricardo A. Rosselló.
A leaked, private group chat between Governor Rosselló and his associates had revealed that they had mocked Puerto Ricans, often using crude and offensive language.
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