In March 2020, the World Health Organization declared a global health crisis from a viral disease known as COVID-19 caused by a coronavirus named SARS-CoV-2. The world population went into a mandatory lockdown and obligatory use of face masks to prevent the virus from spreading. Within this epidemiological context, in late August 2020, on the first day of the general election campaign period, the United States had reached about 6 million cases of COVID-19 and approximately 190K deaths, according to its Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Against all expectations, voter turnout to elect the 46th President set a civic participation record that had not been observed in over 100 years. The aim of this study is to examine the journalistic information disseminated by U.S. Spanish-language television media to Latino voters which motivated them to get out to vote. The theoretical foundation is Agenda-Setting theory focusing on the intermedia agenda-setting effect between Telemundo and Univision by measuring the level of salience emerging from their own news agendas.
TopIntroduction
The winner of the 2020 U.S. presidential election was democracy. Reuters reported that, according to the U.S. Elections Project at The University of Florida1, “[the 2020 election] was setting the stage for the highest participation rate in over a century” (Reuters, 2020, p.1). The news outlet reported that by the end of the last day of early voting, over 90 million citizens had voted, “the record-breaking pace, about 65% of the total turnout in 2016 reflects intense interest in the vote” (p.1). Every state in the nation has different early-voting end dates depending on their own state electoral laws but it usually ranges from seven days prior to Election Day, which was November 3, 2020, all the way to the day before the election. After the general election, DeSilver (2021) noted that citizens voted in record numbers in the presidential race reaching 158.4 million ballots, “that works out to more than six-in-ten people of voting age and nearly two-thirds of estimated eligible voters” (p.1). According to DeSilver, this number is approximately 7% higher than the previous presidential election in 2016 and “turnout was the highest since at least 1980” (p.1). He attributes this rise in political engagement to two key factors: first, the confrontation between President Donald J. Trump (Republican Party) and contender Joseph R. Biden (Democratic Party) which led to a record number of registered voters who felt the call to make their voices heard; and second, the COVID-19-pandemic emergency voting accommodations that many states put in place to keep people safe, such as expanding the eligible dates for mail balloting and early voting (DeSilver, 2021).
The Council of Foreign Relations reported that more than 159 million Americans voted, setting the record for the largest total voter turnout in contemporary U.S. history, “Voter turnout in 2020 was the highest in 120 years when measured as a percentage of the voting-eligible population: 66.7 percent” (Lindsay, 2020, p.1). The 2020 Federal Election Commission report announced that the Democratic candidate won the election with 306 electoral votes over the Republican candidate who obtained 232 votes. The agency explained that whoever obtains 270 electoral votes wins the presidential race. Regarding the nationwide popular vote, NBC reported that Biden won, obtaining 51% of votes followed by Trump with 47%, “Biden’s 4.5-point victory margin is the second largest since 2000, only Barack Obama’s 7-point win in 2008 was larger … 81 million votes Biden won is by far the most any presidential candidate has ever received” (Chinni, 2020, p.1). Chinni, the NBC reporter, wrote that Biden won the popular vote by seven million, which came from two states, California (5 million) and New York (2 million). However, Lindsay (2020) argues that a close examination of “the smallest popular vote shift needed to give Trump a victory, 2020 was close. Indeed, it was even closer than 2016” (p.1). According to the CNN nationwide exit poll (2020), the voter distribution in terms of race was Whites with 67%, Blacks and Latinos tied at 13% each, and Asian and other racial groups with 4% each. Accordingly, Latinos were competing for the second voting power seat in the nation. The exit poll found that Latinos favored Biden (65%) with their vote over Trump (32%). Still, Sonneland (2020) explained that Trump did not win the majority of the Latino vote in any state, save Florida, where the Cuban vote played a decisive role. In addition, Agiesta (2020) pointed out that Trump increased the number of Latino votes in several battleground states. For instance, in Florida Trump captured almost half of the Latino vote, which represented a 35% increase from 2016.