CNN hosted the second GOP presidential debate at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, CA on September 16, the start of Hispanic Heritage Month. In the run-up to the event, Spanish-language media outlets like Diario Las Américas expressed worry that the debate questions wouldn't focus on issues important to Latinos.
The daily Spanish-language newspaper La Opinión referenced the debate's timing in an article about what to watch for. Writer Pilar Marrero cautioned Latinos to be critical of pandering by GOP candidates with anti-immigrant records and said she hoped that “topics of interest such as education, the economy, healthcare” would be discussed in the debate.
After the debate, Miami-based Diario Las Américas declared that the debate's lack of substance mostly favored Trump, even though his arguments were “not always reasonable” and “sometimes hard to understand,” they kept the other candidates on the stage busy responding or reacting. As a result, there were few substantive policy discussion on topics like the economy and unemployment:
Translated from Diario Las Américas:
Last night it took entrepreneur Donald Trump roughly 45 minutes of a debate that lasted over three hours to put all his opponents in his pocket.
His arguments were not always reasonable, sometimes difficult to understand, but sharp enough to silence the rest. “What would you do if China attacked us?” “They are already attacking. We must be strong,” he snapped to his contender, Sen. Rand Paul.
But the biggest topics, like the economy, unemployment or immigration, were only lightly approached, and the conclave in the end was reduced to a social gathering of friends. That's why Trump was ecstatic by the end of the debate, organized by CNN at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. “We had fun,” said the businessman.
What's hard to understand is whether the audiences were able to grasp and assimilate anything of substance. No candidate offered the Hispanic-American world a solution to their problems that went beyond the promise of deportations and sanctions. [Diario Las Américas, 9/17/15]