In October, both presidential candidates, former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, participated in town halls on one of the most important Spanish-language broadcast channels, Univision, with each trying to gain backing from Latino voters in the last leg of the race.
Harris hosted her town hall on Oct. 10, with Trump holding one Oct. 16. Each town hall was moderated by Enrique Acevedo, and Univision broadcasted both town halls on air, and streamed them live on YouTube, making it easy to access for those interested in watching.
Harris began by discussing recent hurricanes Milton and Helene that devastated Southern states, and she addressed the help and work being done. She then addressed the importance of leadership and spoke about the difference between herself and former President Trump. She said that while Trump seems to focus on the past, she planned to focus on a better future.
Questions for Harris mostly surrounded health care and immigration, to which she responded with a mix of personal statements and statistics. She also spoke about lowering insulin costs, something she said would help members of the Hispanic community.
When asked for three virtues she saw in Trump, Harris first criticized her opponent for his divisive rhetoric, but said, “Donald Trump loves his family, and I think that is very important.” She closed that by saying she does not know him well and therefore could not say more.
Overall, Harris stuck to facts and personal statements as she tried to appeal to voters as someone who has worked hard for change and encouraged people to look deeper into Project 2025, a conservative blueprint linked to Trump.
Trump presented his town hall six days later and opened aggressively, cutting off Acevedo to assert that he’d done things that no other Republican had done before. He also said he had a good connection to Hispanic voters, calling them “brilliant and energetic” and saying they were excited and happy to be there.
Trump answered questions very differently than Harris. Where Harris answered with statistics, Trump spoke about his actions but offered no real numbers and said that his actions were the greatest of all time.
Both candidates fielded questions about the economy. Harris offered a skeleton of a plan and Trump merely spoke about how great his economy was under him, without evidence. When asked about previous allegations made about Haitian immigrants eating dogs — something that’s been widely disproven — he asserted it was true and said it must be true because news outlets had covered it.
When asked for three virtues of Harris, Trump said it was the most difficult question of the night and added that he was not a fan of hers. He said her impact on the country had been horrible but listed her “ability to survive” and to maintain longtime friendships as positives.
It’s worth noting that Trump repeated many falsehoods that had been disproven by several credible sources, such as the claims about Haitian immigrants eating pets.
Acevedo posed many of the same questions of both candidates, including a question regarding the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Harris spoke about the lives lost that day, how the actions of rioters were unpatriotic and that their actions were incited by Trump after he lost an election. Trump, meanwhile, said he did not cause the riots and that he’d asked the people who showed up to act peacefully. He also repeated false claims that the 2020 election had been rigged against him.
Both candidates also fielded questions about abortion rights. Harris said that Trump’s policies had limited access to safe abortions and even permitted incest. She also said that the government should not have any involvement with a woman’s health care choices and said that many women have died in the wake of the overturning of Roe because doctors in some states fear arrest.
Trump said the fall of Roe was bound to happen, and he claimed that it was something that “everyone” wanted; however, multiple opinion polls have shown that a large majority of Americans did not want Roe terminated.
Following Trump’s town hall, Univision published an article addressing what Trump spoke on in great detail, but the network’s coverage of Harris’ town hall was not as robust.
When looking toward the reception of both town halls, it can best be quantified by the viewer amount on the YouTube stream count. For Harris, the English version of the stream brought in a total of 263,535 views in total, while the Spanish version totaled 96,403 views as of December 1. The English version of Trump’s town hall stream had a total of 362,266, with the Spanish version racking up 991,743 total streams in the same period.
