Lionel Sosa, the dean of Latino political marketing, has worked on half a dozen Republican presidential campaigns. This time around, Sosa supported the candidacy of New Mexico Democrat Bill Richardson.
Sosa evaluates Richardson’s campaign efforts and discusses who might be the next Latino presidential candidate.
What went wrong? Why didn’t Bill Richardson’s candidacy ignite passions in Iowa and New Hampshire?
Unlike the Republicans that are really not together as to who they want as a nominee, I think the Democrats have a couple of extremely well-known people. We have, of course, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards who was a candidate before. And then Obama who has elicited so much popularity so quickly. So there were three big front-runners and Richardson’s campaign never really got traction. Even though he was the most qualified of them all. When you have three stars of that stature, it is very difficult to put up a fourth star.
Richardson could have raised more money to have reached out to more people because his name awareness was lower than anybody else’s. And when you start off with low name awareness and three stars ahead of you it is extremely difficult to ever catch up.
He never got the support he deserved because there weren’t enough Latinos that knew Richardson was a Latino.
Tags: Bill Richardson, Lionel Sosa
January 11, 2008 at 12:06 pm |
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