Source: mtracey.net
Last night’s Univision “town hall” with Kamala Harris was billed as an exciting opportunity for “undecided Latino voters” to question and evaluate the potential next President of the United States. The corporate press release from Univision advertises it explicitly as such.
But viewers at home would have been wholly unaware that this billing was false. As I discovered, having been granted the sacred opportunity to view the event from an adjacent room on the University of Nevada, Las Vegas campus, the carefully curated “town hall” audience was actually comprised of avowed Harris supporters.
“I already knew I was going to go for Kamala,” one town hall participant told me. “Part of the reason why I wanted to go was just, like, to also fully support her.”
“So you were already decided, before you came?” I asked another. “Yes,” she replied, declaring her support for Kamala.
The audience members I spoke to were selected with the help of a company called FansOnQ, according to the company’s founder, Conny Quintanilla, whose title for yesterday’s event was “Audience Manager.” The company puts out “casting calls” for events like the Latin Grammy Awards, which have been previously held in Las Vegas. It’s a type of company that you might not be consciously aware exists, but once you’re told of its existence, it makes perfect intuitive sense: people who want to dance at award shows are “vetted” by this particular company, perhaps for good looks and rhythmic skills. That’s the same company which filled the seats at Kamala’s town hall.
Another person told me he was able to attend because he “knows people” at an unnamed “progressive organization,” which somehow granted him the ability to get in the town hall audience. The person said he works as an intern for Rep. Steven Horsford, Democrat of Nevada. I’m not naming the person because he was wary of attribution. Others quoted here also didn’t want to be identified.
These aforementioned attendees were essentially just “seat fillers” — they were not the audience members who were called on to ask pre-selected questions. Those audience members were flown in from around the country at Univision’s expense. Which is a bit odd, because there would certainly have been plenty of genuine “undecided Latino voters” in Clark County, Nevada who I’m sure would’ve been more than happy to ask Kamala Harris a question….