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As Russian forces continue their brutal invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin is waging a digital war of his own at home. Russias media sphere, which was tightly controlled by the state even before the Ukraine invasion, has become even smaller. For years, Putin has overseen a sustained crackdown on press freedom in Russiaa process that in recent weeks claimed two of the countrys last remaining independent news broadcasters, TV Rain and Echo of Moscow. Now, thanks to the Kremlins latest censorship law, many of the Wests major news outlets have been forced out of the country too, and millions of Russians find themselves blocked from accessing numerous major social-media platforms as well as anything resembling free and independent news.

Instead of giving up on their Russian audiences, though, international news organizations are trying to exploit gaps within this new digital iron curtain to reach the Russian people.

Although the majority of Russians rely on state-run television as their primary source of news, the fact that some consume news from foreign outlets has long upset the Russian government, which has spent years asserting control over domestic and foreign media in the country. But even by the Kremlins standards, this latest effort to block Russians from much of the internet marks an escalationone that has quickly transformed the country into a digital pariah.

Russians are, however, finding technical workarounds to sidestep the governments bans, some of which have been encouraged by international news outlets that are keen to maintain a digital presence in the country, even if they can no longer claim a physical one. The New York Times, which has announced that it has withdrawn its journalists from Russia, and The Washington Post, which has removed bylines from its Russia stories to prevent its journalists there from being caught up in the crackdown, launched their own dedicated channels on Telegram, the as-yet-unbanned social-media-and-messaging app that claims more than 1 billion downloads (Russia is its second-biggest market) and acts as a platform to both news outlets and Russian state channels alike. Meanwhile, the BBC, whose Russian-language website more than tripled its weekly average audience (10.7 million people compared with its average 3.1 million) in the first week of the Russian invasion, before being blocked by the Kremlin, encouraged its audience to use tools such as the Psiphon app, an open-source, virtual private-network service that helps users conceal their location, and Tor, a more secure web browser. (The British broadcaster also reverted to more old-school tactics, announcing that it would revive its shortwave radio service as an alternative means of reaching its audiences in Ukraine and Russia.) In the weeks since the Russian invasion began, demand for VPNs in the country has skyrocketed by more than 2,500 percent compared with pre-invasion levels, according to Top10VPN, an online VPN tracker.

Perhaps no outlet is better placed to overcome these challenges than Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. The broadcaster was founded during the Cold War with the explicit purpose of reaching audiences behind the Iron Curtain. Despite the Soviet Unions efforts to jam broadcasts, people still found a way through the static, Jamie Fly, the president of RFE/RL, told me. I meet people all the time who remember sitting by the radio, literally turning the dial, trying to find the one frequency that had not been jammed. Today, RFE/RL, which is funded by (though editorially independent from) the United States government, is directing its audience to utilize a number of circumvention tools, including VPNs and Telegram.

I spoke with Fly days after RFE/RL announced that it was suspending its operations in Russia after a more-than-three-decade presence in the country (initiated in 1991 with an invitation from thenRussian President Boris Yeltsin to open a permanent bureau in Moscow, which Putin revoked a decade later). The decision, which came days after the Russian government blocked access to RFE/RL and several other foreign broadcasters, was the culmination of the Kremlins yearslong campaign to expel the broadcasterone that involved designating RFE/RL as a foreign agent and subjecting it to tens of millions of dollars in fines. Although the broadcaster continues to report from within Russia in a limited fashion, Fly said that the majority of its Russian service is now based out of Riga, in neighboring Latvia.

Read: The ultimate symbol of Americas diminished soft power

That RFE/RL now finds itself facing another iron curtain, with its primary methods of serving its audience once again jammed by authorities who would much rather it didnt exist, hasnt undermined its resolve. Our history is coming full circle, Kiryl Sukhotski, who oversees RFE/RLs Russian and Ukrainian teams, told me. Only this time, the broadcaster has more technological tools in its arsenal. In addition to Telegram and VPNs, RFE/RL has also been experimenting with other circumvention tools such as mirror sites, which enable the outlet to replicate or mirror the content from its blocked website at a different URL. When those sites invariably get blocked, we just open up a new mirror, Patrick Boehler, RFE/RLs head of digital strategy, told me. Its a bit of a cat-and-mouse game.

Perhaps the biggest challenge facing the broadcaster isnt getting its content to Russian audiences but ensuring that its methods are easily accessible. This is where the Kremlin has the greatest advantage. For all the Russians who have been able to access independent news and information using various circumvention tools, millions more remain firmly ensconced within the Kremlins echo chamber. Although its influence in Russia has been in decline, state-run television still remains the primary source of news for as much as 62 percent of Russians, according to a 2021 study by the Moscow-based Levada Center, Russias last independent pollster. To tune in to a typical Russian television broadcast, as my colleague Olga Khazan recently did, is to peek into this carefully crafted alternate realityone in which Russia is the victim, the Ukrainian government is controlled by Nazis, and the war in Ukraine doesnt exist.

If youre a middle-aged person who is not really on the internet, who is maybe supportive of Putin and the government, and youre watching TV, as most Russians of that age do, you will definitely be exposed to a firehose of propaganda about how bad the West is and [how] Russians are under attack, Jill Dougherty, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and CNNs former Moscow bureau chief, told me.

The pervasive nature of the Russian governments efforts doesnt make attempts to combat them any less vital, however. Even if a Russian thought that it was propaganda from the West, at least theyre getting a different viewpoint, Dougherty said. What theyre getting right now is only one viewpoint, and it is highly emotional and very angry.

Though news outlets such as RFE/RL are best placed to provide these alternative viewpoints, they arent the only ones who can. Former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger made an impassioned appeal to Russian citizens through Telegram and other channels, urging them to spread the truth about what is happening in Ukraine. Others have endeavored to reach out to ordinary Russians directly using a tool created by a team of Polish programmers known as Squad303 that enables anyone to text, email, or phone tens of millions of Russians at random. Since its March 4 launch, thousands of people have used the service to send more than 40 million messages to Russians directly with information about the war. We are bypassing the digital iron curtain, a Squad303 spokesperson told me. He cited RFE/RL as part of the groups inspiration.

Thanks to Radio Free Europe, there was in us a hunger for freedom and democracy, which was the basis for the creation of Solidarity, which in effect overthrew communism in Europe, he said, referencing the independent Polish trade union. Now we are trying to help the Russian people in the same way.

Arnold Schwarzenegger: I have a message for my Russian friends

The way everyone I spoke with for this story sees it, the Westand, in particular, its news mediahas an obligation not to turn its back on the Russian public. As space for alternative information becomes ever smaller, and as the threats against those who diverge from the Kremlins narrative become more explicit, the greater that responsibility becomes.

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How Western News Outlets Are Piercing Putin's Propaganda Bubble - The Atlantic

by Tan Liwei

Social media are controlled in China, but pieces of information not available elsewhere often appear there, although if they really disturb the CCP they are quickly removed.

President Xi Jinping has personally expressed his dissatisfaction with the fact that the Partys control of cyberspace and social media is not total, and called for new and improved regulations.

Since 2021, these regulations and rules go under the name of Operation QingLang. The literal meaning of QingLang () is cleansed and uncontaminated. Originally, the program was presented as aimed at the control of chaos () in the cyberspace. It was explained that the chaos was mostly created by the fan groups of celebrities, where fanaticism was on display and inappropriate comments were published on a variety of items.

However, as new regulations are continuously produced, it appears that the control of chaos means that everything that is not strictly managed by the CCP is part of a chaos to be cleansed and suppressed. The case of the chained mother of eight, a woman who was found in chains in Jiangsu province, a victim of human trafficking, was the most commented news in social media in years, generated widespread criticism of the authorities, and probably confirmed to the CCP that its control on the Internet is not effective enough.

Two recent developments have attracted the attention and created serious concern among Chinese netizens.

The first is a short announcement by the authorities dated March 15, 2022. It reads that, In response to the current serious network chaos on Douban, on March 15, the State Internet Information Office instructed the Beijing Internet Information Office to dispatch a work supervision team to station on Douban to urge rectification.

This text and its importance may not be immediately understood by non-Chinese. They may not know that Douban is a social networking service with 200 million users. Netizens have known Douban as one of the spaces where control was comparatively less tight, and independent information might be posted, even if cautiously and not on all subjects. When Xi Jinping asked for more control of social networks and media, and launched a campaign against chaos there, he probably had Douban especially in mind. The statement that the service allows network chaos and needs urgent rectification does not bode well for the future of Doubans comparative independence.

The other piece of news is that on March 9, Sheng Ronghua, deputy director of the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) organized a meeting at Sina Weibo to present the QingLang rules to be applied in 2022. Once he was at it, Sheng also summoned, in addition to Sina Weibos, executives of Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu, Kuaishou, Meituan, and Zhihu to attend the meeting, meaning he had there the main companies controlling social media, social networking, microblogging, online question-and-answer services, and online marketplaces in China.

The QingLang 2022 regulations, Sheng explained, consist of four major points.

The first ask that the companies deepen their understanding of the QingLang campaign. They should effectively improve the political position and fight a tough, protracted and overall battle to make sure that all that is posted expresses loyalty to the CCP and the Country.

Second, the companies should assume and assign responsibility. If something disloyal to the CCP and the Country is posted, the Party wants to know who was responsible for it. Each responsibility should be assigned to specific positions and personnel to ensure that all stages of work are carried out without compromise.

Third, once the responsible personnel has been clearly identified, it should control key sections such as topics, groups, and circles. Further chaos will not be tolerated, meaning that posts should be cleaned up and if necessary edited or cancelled immediately.

Fourth, the companies should strengthen security. It is necessary to continuously improve the community rules, and also improve the political commitment of company executives. There should be CCP cells in each company office. The Internet companies should acknowledge the political leading role of Party organizations, and cooperate in case of special operationsan expression that echoes Russian aggression in Ukraine, called a special military operation, but presumably indicates actions to put an end to chaos on the Internet when it disturbs the CCP in a special way, as it is now happening with Douban.

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QingLang Regulations, More of Themand More Control on Chinese Social Media - Bitter Winter

A newly released study warns that artistic freedoms in Hungary are facing graves dangers.

The report, titled Systematic Suppression: Hungarys Arts & Culture in Crisisandreleased this week by theArtistic Freedom Initiative, says that the government led by Prime Minister Viktor Orbn has adopted a systematic mechanism to filter out dissenting voices through changes in law and policy that exert control over public opinion, saidSanjay Sethi, a co-author of the report.

Since theintroduction of rules and regulations that promote greater government control over cultural narratives, artistsand institutions have been forced to self-censor to avoid punishment.

Orbn has used vague legislation and policyto give his party greater authority to take liberties with the arts and culture sector with decreased visibility and accountability, said Johanna Bankston, a co-author of the report, which includesinterviews with eight arts and cultural workers conducted between April and June 2021.

He has reshaped Hungarian media, arts, and culture to control cultural narratives, which has in turn allowed his party to stay in power longer, and may very well secure them a third term in national elections next month.

A participant holds a placard showing Russian President Vladimir Putin in front of the parliament building in Budapest on June 14, 2021, during a demonstration against the Hungarian governments draft bill seeking to ban the promotion of homosexuality and sex changes. Photo by Gergely Besenyei/AFP via Getty Images.

SinceOrbn came into power in 2010 through his Hungarian Civic Alliance (FIDESZ), his government has advocated conservative, nationalist values that are in line with the countrys Christian heritage, the report said.

Against such a backdrop, the countrys arts sector suffered a great blow after new rules and regulations penalized pluralist perspectives and alternative opinions, branding as anti-Hungarian.

Changes in the constitution and legislature played a key role. In 2019, a controversial culture bill sought toremove the National Cultural Fund, the main government funding source for the arts. The attempt sparked outrage and saw more than 50,000 people sign a petition in protest.

The law, however,passed, allowing the government greater control over cultural institutions. Art schools are also affected after a similar overhaul.

Participants gather near the parliament building in Budapest on June 14, 2021, during a demonstration against the Hungarian governments draft bill seeking to ban the promotion of homosexuality and sex changes. Photo by Gergeley Besenyei/AFP via Getty Images.

Some art workers have expressed frustrations over the current situation, saying they are forced to choose between censoring themselves and risking marginalization.

This is an existential question for artists,one anonymous interviewee said in the report. Especially in the case of Hungary, there is no private market and there are no private institutions, so there is no independent scene, and everyone is depending on public funding.

There is then no further need for official censorship, since this process automatically guarantees the proper ideological content, said Hungarian art historian Edit Andrs.

Despite the seemingly dire circumstances, the report offered policy recommendations in a hopeful note.

It is important to acknowledge that there are still many democratic institutions and processes in place in Hungary which, though they have been weakened by FIDESZs administrative rule, can be refortified through local and/or EU intervention, Sethi said.

Bankston further urged the international art community to support Hungarian artists by giving them opportunities to exhibit abroad.

We also encourage them to support independent Hungarian arts organizations through funding, artistic collaborations, and partnerships, as autonomous spaces for artistic production still exist in the country, she said.

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A New Report Says Victor Orbns Government in Hungary Is Systematically Curtailing Freedom of Expression - artnet News

When the owners of a Tennessee comics shop learned that a local school board had voted to remove Art Spiegelmans Holocaust classic Maus from its curriculum, they sprang into action with an appeal calling for donations to fund free copies for schoolchildren. Within hours, money started pouring in from all over the world. We had donations from Israel, the UK and Canada as well as from the US, says Richard Davis, co-owner of Nirvana Comics.

Ten days later, they closed the appeal, after raising $110,000 (84,000) from 3,500 donors. We bought up all the copies the publisher had in its warehouse and were now in the process of shipping 3,000 copies of Maus to students all over the country, along with a study guide written by a local schoolteacher, says Davis, who has relied on volunteers to help with the distribution.

For Spiegelman, it has meant an exponential sales boost for a 30-year-old book the only graphic novel to win a Pulitzer prize, in 1992 and a flurry of speaking engagements across the country. It just shows, he says, you cant ban books unless youre willing to burn them and you cant burn them all unless youre willing to burn the writers and the readers too.

Thats just as well, adds the 74-year-old cartoonist, because this is the most Orwellian version of society Ive ever lived in. Its not as simple as left v right. Its a culture war thats totally out of control. As a first-amendment fundamentalist, I believe in the right of anyone to read anything, provided they are properly supported. If a kid wants to read Mein Kampf, its better to do it in a library or school environment than to discover it on Daddys shelves and be traumatised.

Unfortunately, there is an unprecedented rise in attempts to remove books from the USs libraries and schools. The American Library Association (ALA) told the Guardian that in the period from 1 September to 30 November, more than 330 unique cases were reported more than double the number for the whole of 2020, and nearing the total for the previous (pre-pandemic) year.

Its definitely getting worse, says Suzanne Nossel, the CEO of the free-speech organisation PEN America, which has led the resistance against book banning for more than a decade. We used to hear about a book challenge or ban a few times a year. Now its every week or every day. We also see proposed legislative bans, as opposed to just school districts taking action. It is part of a concerted effort to try to hold back the consequences of demographic and social change by controlling the narratives available to young people.

Predominantly, the ALA reported, the challenges were targeted at the voices of the marginalised books and resources that mirror the lives of those who are gay, queer or transgender, or that tell the stories of persons who are Black, Indigenous or persons of colour. Or, as Spiegelman says, of his own experience: If I was a transgender Black great-grandchild of slaves, Id be more likely to be banned. This feels like a drive-by shooting.

Maus was removed on the basis of eight swearwords mainly God damn and nudity: a bare-breasted, suicidal mouse representing Spiegelmans mother, who killed herself when he was 20 years old. The ironic thing about it, says the cartoonist, is that he never intended the book for children, but wrote it to work out his own feelings about the parental legacy of the Holocaust. I was a bit offended at first when I learned that it was being used in schools, but, after speaking to young people who had read the books [it was originally published in two volumes], I just had to drop my prejudice and accept they were fine with it.

Many of the challenges centre on a moral hysteria about the protection of children. Theyre playing woke snowflakery back: This might upset people, says Margaret Atwood in an email to me. A graphic novel version of Atwoods The Handmaids Tale was one of the books removed from classroom libraries in a Texas school district in December, along with two other dystopian graphic novel classics: an adaptation of Shirley Jacksons The Lottery, and Alan Moores V for Vendetta.

Texas sensitivities about The Handmaids Tale are not new for Atwood, who directs me to an open letter she wrote in 2006 to a school authority after learning that it had decided to remove the novel because of sexual explicitness and offence to Christians (a decision that was overturned after impassioned representations from students). First, she wrote, the remark: Offensive to Christians amazes me. Nowhere in the book is the regime identified as Christian. As for sexual explicitness, The Handmaids Tale is a lot less interested in sex than is much of the Bible.

Though the current censorship drive in the US is predominantly in Republican states, it has become a tit-for-tat controversy, with conservative commentators quick to point out that the left has its own form in censoring classics such as To Kill a Mockingbird or Huckleberry Finn for their perceived racist content. The only ones banning books are critical race theorists, wrote the Jewish News Syndicate columnist Daniel Greenfield. Erstwhile liberals, who had once vocally championed Huck and Mockingbird and shouted down any effort to keep them out of the classroom, now just as vocally want them out and replaced with Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X Kendi.

Ta-Nehisi Coatess memoir Between the World and Me, written as a letter to his teenage son, was among more than 800 books about social justice identified for removal from Texas schools by a state legislator last year, on the basis that they were liable to make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex. Kendis profile, as director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University and the author of three influential books on the history of racism in the US (as well as a childrens book), has made him a lightning rod in the row over critical race theory, which according to the Brookings Institute thinktank has become a new bogeyman for people unwilling to acknowledge our countrys racist history and how it impacts the present.

The relationship between book challenges and attempts to control public debate is particularly obvious in this arena, with Brookings reporting in November that nine states (Idaho, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Arizona, and North Dakota) had already passed legislation against the teaching of critical race theory, with a further 20 either in the process of doing so, or planning to.

We do see increased resort to censoriousness on both the left and the right, says Nossel. On the left, it targets books that some people regard as racially offensive, sometimes because they originate from a different time period, when slurs were used more widely than is acceptable now. But it is the right that has invoked the machinery of government including legislative proposals in dozens of states to enforce these bans and prohibitions. In the hierarchy of infringements of free speech that must be recognised as more severe and alarming.

She adds: There must be room for communities to debate what books and curriculum should be made available to students at various levels of education, and parents deserve a say. But ideologically driven crusades to ban particular narratives and viewpoints infringe upon open discourse in the classroom.

It is not only in Tennessee that an alarmed progressive public has responded by pouring money into the pushback. In February, Markus Dohle, the CEO of the publisher Penguin Random House, said he would personally donate at least $500,000 to PEN America to kickstart a new fund to fight book banning, while PRH itself pledged a further $100,000.

Such high stakes might seem unthinkable in the UK, where censorship technically ended with the abolition of the Lord Chamberlains role as theatre censor in 1968. Banning for swearwords as in the Maus case is a peculiarly US thing, as is banning books for sex, like Judy Blumes Forever was from some US state libraries for a long time, says Julia Eccleshare, the director of the Hay childrens festival. There are two reasons for that. One, the US still has a very active childrens library service, so a collective of easy-to-rouse gatekeepers. Two, the religious right remains very powerful, so fundamentalist Bible teaching is still brought into arguments.

More recently, says Eccleshare, the US has been very much on the front foot in attacking anything that can be interpreted as cultural appropriation or cultural insensitivity. Most tragically, I think, Laura Ingalls Wilders Little House on the Prairie series has fallen from being a national treasure to being shunned, because of the Native Americans being described as frightening.

In the UK, she adds, there are rarely these public bans, with the exception perhaps of the Little Black Sambo books, which were quite publicly removed from library shelves. Back in 2003, the author Anne Fine tried to use her influence as childrens laureate to get Melvin Burgesss young-adult novel Doing It junked by its publisher, on the grounds of obscenity, but only succeeded in increasing its sales.

Plenty of books go out of print because they are no longer politically acceptable, and we do quietly remove books, says Eccleshare. Its usually to do with racism, because we have changed such a lot in how we think. Enid Blytons original Noddy stories vanished years ago, on account of their obvious racism. Similarly, Tintin in the Congo is only available now from very shady booksellers on the web.

The reasons for book banning have fluctuated over history, but fall roughly into three categories: religion, obscenity and political control. In 213BC, the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang buried 460 scholars alive and burned all the books in his kingdom so he could control how history would remember his reign (his distant successor Xi Jinping blocked the name Winnie-the-Pooh from social media sites after being compared to the tubby bear). The first list of books forbidden in Christianity was issued by the pope in the fifth century. And, in 1749, more than a century before the Obscene Publications Act was introduced in the UK, the writer John Cleland was charged with obscenity for Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, a pornographic moneyspinner he wrote while languishing in a debtors prison.

DH Lawrences Lady Chatterleys Lover had been available in France and Italy for more than 30 years before it was published in the UK in 1960, whereupon its publisher, Penguin, was prosecuted. After a six-day trial at the Old Bailey, during which the books defenders included the novelist EM Forster and the critic Raymond Williams, the jury found Lady Chatterleys Lover to be not obscene. On the first day it was available, a month later, all 200,000 copies sold.

The Lady Chatterley case also demonstrates the international reach of censorship, with separate obscenity trials in Japan, Australia, Canada, India and the US (where it was exonerated along with Fanny Hill and Henry Millers Tropic of Cancer). But, it is in the political arena that book banning is now most toxic globally, with writers themselves under threat, in some parts of their world, along with their books.

The UK is the refuge for two novelists banned from their homelands, who still write in their languages of origin. Hamid Ismailov won the EBRD literature prize in 2019 with The Devils Dance, the first Uzbek novel to be translated into English. Ismailov fled Uzbekistan in 1992 because of what the authoritarian state described as his unacceptable democratic tendencies and worked for the BBC for 25 years. The Devils Dance was smuggled into the country. Im the most widely published Uzbek, yet nobody can mention any of my books. Nobody can mention my name in any article, review [or] historic piece. Its a total ban of my name, of activity, of books, of existence. Its as if Im nonexistent, he has said.

His most recent novel, Manaschi, offers a unique perspective on the colonisation by stealth of former parts of the Soviet empire by China and also of the complex geopolitical legacy that has led to conflicts such as that playing out in Ukraine. Its a part of post-Soviet history that is unravelling. In the initial aftermath of the USSR breakup, many were surprised by how peacefully it happened lets say in comparison with the breakup of Yugoslavia, he says. But the Soviet Union left lots of knots, like the border issues, diasporas, ethnic minorities, mixed populations that are quite explosive in the framework of ethnic states, which inherited that legacy.

The writer Ma Jian has been in exile from mainland China since 1987, when he published a collection of short stories based on his travels in Tibet, which was immediately banned. Until 2008, he says, his novels were published in Hong Kong, but since then they have only been available in Taiwan. By the time he finished his most recent novel, 2018s China Dream, even the underground bookshops in Hong Kong that had quietly imported his work had been shut down. Every Hong Kong publisher I approached turned China Dream down. They said if they did publish it, theyd lose their jobs, and, anyway, there were no bookshops left in Hong Kong that would dare sell it.

Such international examples offer an ominous clue as to where the censorship surge in the US could lead, says Nossel. In the 20th century, the South African apartheid state banned 12,000 books, at one point commandeering a steel factory furnace in order to burn reviled texts. And, in the 1930s, the Nazi party railed against un-German books, staging book burnings of Jewish, Marxist, pacifist and sexually explicit literature.

Legislation adopted in Hungary last year banned from schools all books referencing homosexuality, in the name of the protection of children. In 2014, Russia passed a law adding Nazi propaganda to the subjects it bans and restricts LGBT content, offences to traditional values, and criticisms of the state are among others, says Nossel. Booksellers were so fearful of running afoul of the broad law that they removed Spiegelmans Maus from stores because of the swastika on the books cover, despite its potent anti-fascist message.

This is a book about memory, said Spiegelman at the time. We dont want cultures to erase memory, because then they just keep doing the same thing again and again.

The symmetry between Russia and the US is striking. As Oscar Wilde once wrote: The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

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Its a culture war thats totally out of control: the authors whose books are being banned in US schools - The Guardian

Democrats will have a hard time preserving their slim majority if Cortez Masto and Kelly are defeated. And the two first-term senators probably cant win unless Latino voters turn out in strong numbers for them.

These are states where its going to be so close so, losing 2 or 3 percentage points of the Latino vote compared to the last [midterm] election would be devastating for Kelly or Cortez Masto, said Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist and former senior adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) presidential campaign. Not only do Democrats need to get Latinos to perform they need to overperform if theyre going to win.

Not only do Democrats need to get Latinos to perform they need to overperform if theyre going to win.

Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist

Latinos have long been regarded as a key constituency for Democrats in both states. Arizona, where Kelly won his 2020 special election by fewer than 79,000 votes, is home to about 1.2 million eligible Latino voters, who represent one-in-four eligible voters. In Nevada, Cortez Masto the first and only Latina ever elected to the Senate won her seat in 2016 by fewer than 27,000 votes. More than 400,000 Latinos are eligible to vote there, making up 20 percent of the states total.

But the early Democratic spending on Spanish-language ads in the two races represents a marked shift after years of complaints from Latino operatives that the party waits until the last minute to spend on Latino outreach.

In Arizona, Majority Forward, the nonprofit arm of Senate Democrats super PAC, has spent more than $1.5 million on Spanish-language television and radios in March alone, according to a spreadsheet created by a leading media buying company and shared with POLITICO by a Democratic consultant. The ads have largely run across the Phoenix, Tucson and Yuma areas. Kellys campaign also spent almost $28,000 on Spanish-language radio ads in the Tucson market.

In Nevada, Majority Forward has spent more than $640,000 on Spanish-language TV and radio ads in the Las Vegas and Reno areas this month, in addition to the more than $14,000 spent by Cortez Mastos campaign.

I havent seen spending from Democrats on Spanish-language ads this early in a Senate race in my entire career, Rocha said.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee has been running Spanish-language TV, radio and digital ads in both states since last year, though Republicans have not spent on those ads this month.

Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), chair of BOLD PAC, the Congressional Hispanic Caucuss campaign arm, said the amount spent on Spanish-language ads in Arizona so far is huge, considering that there have been elections when $1.5 million was spent on such ads over the course of an entire year.

Clearly, lessons have been learned by Democrats, Gallego said.

Still, Latino organizers and leaders in both states emphasize that Republicans are executing their own effort on the ground and its going to take much more than Spanish-language ads to ensure Democratic victories in November.

Its going to be harder than we think it is. While Republicans may not be making big buys in Spanish radio or TV, were certainly seeing them on the ground, said Melissa Morales, president of Somos PAC, a Latino voter mobilization organization that targets battleground states. Theyre running Latino-focused events in Nevada right now They know were there and theyre there, too.

Clearly, lessons have been learned by Democrats, Rep. Ruben Gallego said.|J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo

Morales noted that Somos has gotten funding from donors earlier than ever before, signaling to her that there is a recognition within the party of the importance of courting Latino voters. While she welcomed the ad spending so far, she cautioned that TV and radio ads are not nearly enough to ensure a strong performance in the fall.

I want to remind that this is going to take one-on-one conversations, its going to take organizing and its going to take reaching people personally where theyre at, Morales said.

Arizona and Nevada stand out as two of only three battleground states the other is Colorado that are expected to see significantly increased Hispanic turnout this year, according to projections from the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund. Arizona is expected to see a 9.6 percent increase in Latino voters, while Nevada will see a 5.8 percent jump, compared to 2018.

Rocha called Arizona and Nevada the top two states with sizable Latino populations that will be crucial for Democrats to keep their majority, followed by Florida, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

A nonprofit founded by Biden allies, Building Back Together, has bolstered Democratic efforts by touting the presidents wins and the senators who helped make them possible to Latinos in Arizona and Nevada. The group is spending nearly $1 million in bilingual ads across TV, radio and digital platforms in battleground states.

Recently, the group ran Spanish-language TV ads exclusively in both states promoting Bidens role in helping small businesses with loans amid the pandemic. They also placed Spanish-language billboards in Arizona touting how Biden, in his first year in office, had invested $2.7 billion in loans for Latino-owned small businesses, child tax credit checks for 17 million Latino children and heath care for 730,000 Latinos.

Mayra Macias, chief strategy officer of Building Back Together, explained that one of the reasons the group is targeting Arizona and Nevada, as well as other battleground states with large Latino populations, is because those are states where its going to be important for [Biden] to have folks that will back up his agenda.

At the same time, there is a keen awareness of frustrations among some Latino leaders and organizers who argue that the Biden administration hasnt followed through on all its campaign promises and needs to push harder to get more done this year.

Both the administration and the party are falling short of delivering on the promises our communities were expecting and that they showed up for [by voting] in the middle of a pandemic, said Alejandra Gomez, co-executive director of LUCHA, a grassroots organization in Arizona that plans to knock on hundreds of thousands of doors this year.

So, I ask: How bad do Democrats want to win? Because Latinos are ready, she added. Theyre turning out but we need to give people something to be excited for.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misstated that Republicans have not spent money on Spanish-language TV or radio ads for the Senate races in Arizona and Nevada. The GOP has spent in both states, but not this month.

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Dems begin building a Latino vote firewall in the West - POLITICO