Can Warren Petersen win over Latino voters with his Spanish-speaking pitch?

Republican Warren Petersen is making a play for Latino voters with a Spanish-language digital ad featuring state Rep. Lydia Hernandez, his Mexican-born wife and other Latinos.

The 30-second ad is Petersen’s attempt to show that his conservative politics can draw Latino voters — and that Hernandez can help him do it in his bid to unseat Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes.

If Hernandez is the best Petersen can do to show his crossover appeal, he might as well pack up and go home. The self-described conservative Democrat has been censured by fellow party members for repeatedly voting with Republicans and has been wreaking havoc at the Cartwright School District, where she serves on the board.

But hear me out. Petersen, who’s trailing in the polls, must be betting that he can win at least a few of Hernandez’s backers, and that it will be enough to help close the gap in a race Mayes won in 2022 by just 280 votes.

Hernandez endorsed Petersen after losing her Democratic primary in July, when she lost resoundingly. Democrats have since mocked her and dismissed her as a political loser.

But they shouldn’t be so quick to write her off just yet.

The mockery surely resonates with progressives, but it misses the larger point. Unless, of course, those same progressives are confident they can outnumber conservative Latinos still willing to bet on Trump’s policies and local allies like Petersen to carry them out.

Latinos make up 1 in 4 Arizona voters. Nationwide, 69% of Latinos who once supported Trump now disapprove of him, according to a recent NBC News/Telemundo poll.

The same poll shows that two-thirds think Trump’s deportation crackdown has gone too far and three-quarters disapprove of his handling of the economy.

I haven’t seen significant polling focused on Arizona Latinos in this particular race. But Petersen has tied his chances of defeating Mayes to Trump and backs his violent deportation agenda, and he is betting on the smaller slice of Latino voters who still support the president.

That’s where Hernandez and the other Spanish-speaking backers come in handy.

Hernandez represents a heavily Hispanic district that includes Maryvale and other parts of Phoenix’s west side. If she can bring even a few hundred voters to Petersen, she could make the difference in a race that may again be decided by a razor-thin margin.

Recent polling shows Mayes with an edge over Petersen, especially among independents. Still, she can’t afford to dismiss Hernandez or any other voter the Republican might attract, even with his troubling record.

Petersen issued subpoenas for Maricopa County ballots and election equipment and was a driving force behind the Senate’s sham audit of the 2020. The Senate later hired the infamous Cyber Ninjas, which championed the “Stop the Steal” movement fueled by false claims that the election was stolen from Trump.

That’s damaging for Petersen, especially because he’s running under Trump’s banner as the president’s popularity sinks among Americans, particularly Latinos.

But then again, Latinos are still astonishingly split between Democrats and Republicans when it comes to border security.

Petersen touts his Mexican connection while championing hardline immigration legislation such as Prop. 314, which makes it a state crime to cross the U.S.-Mexico border illegally and gives local authorities greater power to deport undocumented immigrants.

Mayes, by contrast, has filed a slew of lawsuits against the Trump administration. She successfully helped block Trump’s plan to end birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants and forced the federal government to pause plans for the ICE warehouse in Surprise until an environmental impact review is completed.

Petersen seems to think that touting his wife’s Mexican roots, enlisting Hernandez and speaking directly to Spanish-speaking Latinos will earn their trust.

That won’t happen on a grand scale. But he’s betting that Latino voters aren’t a monolith.

Hernandez doesn’t need to turn thousands of Democrats into Republicans for Petersen. She only needs to move enough voters to make a difference in a race that might be decided by a few thousand votes — or a few hundred.

Mayes can’t afford to take that lightly. And Petersen knows it.