The team behind President Donald Trump's re-election campaign found quite the way to dampen Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden's newly launched initiative to rally Latino voters.
The Trump campaign bought the "Todos Con Biden" (Spanish for "All with Biden") web domain name after the Biden team kicked off their Latino outreach Wednesday with that same phrase.
When people visit TodosConBiden.com, a screenshot with a picture of a cross-armed Biden looking down pops up, with a message that says, "Oops, Joe forgot about Latinos. Joe is all talk." After the message paid for by the Trump campaign shows up, visitors get redirected to the "Latinos For Trump" official site.
Isabel Aldunate, the Biden campaign's deputy director of strategic communications and the Hispanic media press secretary, responded in an emailed statement: "It is no surprise that Trump's Campaign would resort to childish antics like this to take attention away from this President's appalling record of separating families and using immigrants as scapegoats, fomenting hatred and white supremacy, and trying to take away health care from millions of Americans who need it."
Biden's team initially started using #TodosConBiden on Twitter to promote the launch of their Latino outreach initiatives, but trolls quickly took over the hashtags to make fun of Biden and other presidential candidates, such as Julián Castro, the only Latino presidential candidate.
José Parra, a Democratic strategist and the former senior adviser to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, told NBC News that the Trump campaign's move "is a hiccup that no one wants. When campaigns launch a new initiative, they usually want the rollout to be perfect."
Parra said he's confident that the Biden campaign will "be able to recover from this — good policy is good policy."
Bertica Cabrera Morris, a Republican strategist who is part of the Latinos for Trump campaign, told NBC News. "It's a competition and you try to take advantage any way you can, and this is an advantage we took."
But this has gone the other way too, Aldunate pointed out. Last month, the Trump campaign launched an initiative called “Vamos to Victory” in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month. At that time, Latino Victory Fund, a progressive organization working to strengthen Latinos' political power, took over the VamosToVictory.com web page and it now redirects users to a Latino Victory Fund page "hammering Trump on his failures," Aldunate stated.
Biden’s campaign took over the @VamostoVictory Twitter handle, which was also "up for grabs,” Aldunate said.
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