Disciplined campaign messaging, ground game carried Laguna’s Sol Aragones to victory

Many times during the campaign for the 2025 gubernatorial election in Laguna, former congresswoman Sol Aragones sounded like a broken record, but the apparent strategy worked.

Aragones stuck to easy, digestible soundbites on health, kept her promises short and sweet, and rarely deviated from talking points she had established during the campaign.

In the end, it was the discipline, and the groundwork laid after a painful 2022 defeat, that carried her to victory.

Rappler breaks down Aragones’ path to success.

Founded her own national party to rely on

Aragones was an outgoing congresswoman of nine years in the third district of Laguna when she decided — with only eight months left before the 2022 elections — that it was time to gun for the province’s highest post.

Aragones lost by 16-percentage points, or around 250,000 votes, to Governor Ramil Hernandez, who at the time was running for a third and final term. Despite falling short, she was able to secure 638,000 votes, solid proof that she can command votes at the provincial level.

Instead of wallowing in defeat, Aragones maximized the next three years to lay the foundation of a winning gubernatorial candidacy.

By December that year, she had already founded Akay ni Sol, deemed as a civic advocacy movement aimed at helping persons with disabilities.

In 2024, it became a national party named Akay, inducting hundreds of members. Akay ni Sol, meanwhile, registered with the Commission on Elections to take part in the party-list system of representation.

In the 2025 elections, Aragones said around 100 politicians ran under the banner of Akay in Laguna, including winning Pagsanjan mayor and former governor ER Ejercito.

Unlike the last election cycle, Aragones also had more time to court voters in the province, which has 30 cities and municipalities.

“We went around all four districts, even the far-flung towns. Governor Sol reached all of them — places she had been unable to visit before,” said Amado Basilio Jr., a barangay councilor in San Pablo who worked in the 2022 and 2025 gubernatorial bids of Aragones.

Offered a simple message on health

Akay’s vision upon its establishment is the construction of a public Level 3 or tertiary hospital in Laguna. During the campaign, Aragones leaned heavily into that message.

Even when Rappler talked to attendees of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s campaign rally for his senatorial ticket in Santa Rosa in March, among their top frustrations was the fact that they had to go to Batangas or Manila to seek medical treatment, since Level 1 or Level 2 facilities in the province lacked the necessary equipment.

Health became the defining issue of the local campaign in Laguna, as Aragones and her three major opponents laid out their track record and their platform on health.

Laguna 2nd District Representative Ruth Hernandez, wife of term-limited Governor Ramil Hernandez, had already authored the measure seeking to establishing a regional hospital in Bay, signed by President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in November 2024. Groundbreaking for that project started in May that year, led by her husband, whose provincial government donated the land to the Department of Health.

The construction of that medical facility, however, would take years. In an election landscape dominated by promises of quick-fix solutions, candidates had to also articulate their vision for immediate relief. It’s where Aragones stood out.

“We want a hospital that has complete equipment,” she would say. “We will prohibit rude government employees,” she would also say. “We will build Akay ni Sol pharmacies in every locality,” she would also add. All these talking points were uttered over and over throughout the campaign.

Quezon Governor Helen Tan, Aragones’ close friend and batch mate in Congress, believes Aragones succeeded in getting her message through.

“I was telling them, how can you make people see health as something sexy? It’s like politicians always promise aid, but how do you make the issue of health appealing to the public? Sol was able to deliver that, and people understood the message she wanted to get across,” Tan told Rappler.

Embraced her journalist identity

The advocacy on health isn’t foreign to Aragones. She told dozens, if not hundreds, of stories about it in her old life — as a multi-awarded broadcast journalist.

Before she became a politician, Aragones was first a reporter for many years in media giant ABS-CBN, appearing on television every night via the flagship newscast TV Patrol to deliver news to the masses.

During her stint that lasted more than a decade, she had been assigned to the health beat as a reporter. On weekends, she also produced reports for Salamat Dok, the network’s defunct medical public service program.

She never shunned her journalist roots, and why would she, when the country has elected media personalities repeatedly? Other prolific ABS-CBN news anchors also made successful transitions to politics — Noli de Castro became vice president, Loren Legarda became senator, Ted Failon became congressman.

During Aragones’ first attempt at the capitol in 2022, her campaign ad for broadcast resembled a voice over package with a lower-thirds that said “Breaking News: Sol Aragones to fill the gaps in Laguna.”

In her latest electoral run, she stayed true to this style, and in fact doubled down on it. She presented campaign issues as if she were a news anchor, complete with graphics material mimicking television news reports.

“Caught on camera! This is the show that will monitor the province of Laguna up to election day,” she said in one of her Facebook videos, before reporting on contributed photos of patients’ poor experiences at public hospitals in the province.

Combated ‘fake news’ immediately

When disinformation came her way, the former journalist quickly debunked it.

In February, a deepfake video showed her likeness saying that she aimed to make life difficult for government employees if she were to be elected in office. Aragones published a response asserting that the circulating video was fake.

When her camp was made aware of a supposed organized social media effort to post negative feedback about Aragones, she exposed it. When she heard that there were people claiming to be from her team giving out financial assistance to frame her for vote-buying, she quickly distanced herself from it.

“There’s so much disinformation. I used to be a journalist, and as part of our creed as journalists, it’s important that information is accurate and truthful. That’s why we’re pushing back against this. We won’t allow them to get away with it,” Aragones told Rappler.

“If they have something to say, let’s talk about platforms. Candidates don’t need to hide behind trolls,” she added.

Isolated herself from the noise of national politics

The biggest hurdle faced by Aragones in the run-up to election day was a national issue that barely defined the local campaign landscape.

Aragones had to explain her endorsement of the senatorial bid of Congressman Dante Marcoleta, infamously known for leading the efforts to close ABS-CBN, Aragones’ former employer, back in 2020. The shutdown, widely seen as an affront to press freedom during the Duterte administration, led to the retrenchment of thousands of media workers at the height of the pandemic.

Aragones’ former colleagues in ABS-CBN, to say the least, were disappointed. The most impactful criticism came from the organization’s retired news chief Ging Reyes.

“Marking five years since ABS-CBN’s broadcast shutdown brings back painful memories. That wound was deep. Apparently, not for everyone,” Reyes had said.

Aragones defended the move, asserting she would endorse anyone who would support her vision for better health care in the province.

“Politics has its dynamics. If this is for the good of Laguna, I’ll do it. This is no longer about Sol, this is about Laguna. That’s why I’m asking for their understanding,” she said.

Aragones believes her endorsement of Marcoleta was unfairly highlighted during her last grand rally before the end of the campaign period, when she also gave a platform to other senatorial aspirants, namely Willie Revillame, Vic Rodriguez, Bong Go, Francis Tolentino, Bam Aquino, and Pia Cayetano. In the months prior, she had also endorsed Camille Villar and Imee Marcos.

But as her former ABS-CBN colleague Pinky Webb pointed out to Aragones in an interview with Bilyonaryo News Channel, “Someone like Bam Aquino probably wouldn’t be as hard to accept for your colleagues, or a Francis Tolentino, compared to a Rodante Marcoleta..”

Hardly an elephant in the room was the reality that Aragones was stuck between a rock and a hard place.

When the May 3 rally was held, Iglesia ni Cristo had yet to announce the candidate it would back in the Laguna gubernatorial race. Marcoleta, the INC candidate, had been welcomed in several rallies across the Philippines, as local candidates sought the coveted INC endorsement.

In tight races, such an endorsement could decide an election, because the religious group practices bloc voting. Aragones, who was courting the INC, could not afford to reject or alienate Marcoleta.

INC, which was vehemently against the impeachment of Vice President Sara Duterte, eventually, surprisingly chose to back Hernandez, despite her vote to indict Duterte back in February. While political divisions at the national level hardly made a dent on the gubernatorial race, Hernandez and Santa Rosa Representative Dan Fernandez had been called out by propaganda pages in Laguna for signing Duterte’s impeachment papers.

Unlike in other local races in the Philippines, Duterte also did not support any candidate in the gubernatorial election in Laguna. When Aragones was once asked how she thinks the Vice President’s impeachment would affect her contest, she directed the conversation back to local issues.

“It’s difficult to comment on national issues at this time. We’d rather bring the focus to, and concentrate on, the local issues here in Laguna,” Aragones told Rappler during the campaign.

The failure to get INC’s endorsement resulted in uncertainty from Aragones’ campaign team’s end heading to election day. Her staff had told Rappler that her association with ABS-CBN and her vocal stance against its shutdown in 2020 may have dissuaded the religious group from supporting her candidacy.

Decisive win in most cities, towns

In the end, it didn’t matter. On election night, she secured the win in 24 out of 30 localities.

She garnered over 90,000 votes in her hometown San Pablo, five times higher than second placer Hernandez’s 18,000 votes. Aragones also topped the race in Santa Rosa, the province’s second most populous city, beating Fernandez in his bailiwick.

Aragones also had a comfortable lead in San Pedro and Biñan, cities that were up for grabs as they were not turfs of any of the four candidates for governor.

Of the six localities in which Aragones only placed second, four were either former or current constituencies of Hernandez.

Overall, Aragones got some 635,000 votes, compared to Hernandez’s 547,000, essentially maintaining the level of support she got from her 2022 run.

Now, the hard part

Only days after her proclamation, Aragones is already attracting criticism over supposed plans to name her upcoming projects with “Sol.” For instance, Aragones has said she plans to construct “Akay ni Sol” pharmacies once she formally assumes the post in the capitol. Netizens also unearthed a previous project titled “Scholar ni Sol.”

The practice of attaching politicians’ names to government projects reflects the Philippines’ longstanding problem with patronage or “epal” politics, something many Filipinos have been pushing back against.

“What you saw was from before, during the campaign period. We have to understand that during campaigns, name recall is really important,” Aragones said. “Will you be seeing only ‘Sol’ in the coming days? Just wait, changes are coming.”

There will be a learning curve for Aragones, whose only experience in elected office was legislative work.

She will also have to build her network of allies from scratch, as her vice governor and the entire 18-member provincial board come from opposing parties.

On top of that, she will inherit a provincial administration staffed largely by people who had long served her rival predecessor.

“Of course, I advised her to hopefully give a chance to those working at the capitol. It’s common for people to be let go en masse because of political affiliations,” Tan said.

Running a successful campaign is one thing, running a competent government is another.

Her test of leadership begins, as the province of more than three million people expects her to deliver. – Rappler.com