Political pundits were stunned last month when, days before the presidential election, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe made this asinine and insulting joke about Puerto Rico at a New York campaign rally for former President Donald Trump:
“There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”
Those pundits guaranteed Puerto Rican voters would punish Trump for it — especially in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania, which has one of the country’s largest Puerto Rican populations.
It didn’t happen. Trump — now President-elect Trump — instead did remarkably better than expected with Boricuas, as Puerto Ricans are often called.
In Florida, for example, Trump won Osceola County — which has the highest concentration of Puerto Ricans in the state. Florida political experts who’ve examined precinct returns tell WLRN Puerto Rican voters likely put him over the top there.
Then President Trump in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, on Oct. 3, 2017, tossing paper towels at victims of Hurricane Maria during his controversial visit to the U.S. island territory, which was devastated by the storm.
“It was just another example that Democrats always wait too long to engage the Puerto Rican community,” says John Quiñones, an attorney in Kissimmee, the seat of Osceola County — and the first Republican Puerto Rican elected to Florida’s state House of Representatives, in 2002.
Since that time, Quiñones has helped convince the Republican Party that the Puerto Rican vote is no longer Democratic by default.
Though Quiñones says he too was offended by Hinchcliffe’s joke about Puerto Rico — the U.S. island territory where Quiñones himself was born — he believes Trump distanced himself from it. The real issue, he insists, is that the Democratic Party has taken Puerto Ricans for granted — and Trump and the Republicans have been pouncing in recent years.
“It’s about Republicans talking to Puerto Ricans at a level of, ‘This is how our policies will help your pocket, your families,'” says Quiñones, “as opposed to pushing a liberal, progressive agenda at Puerto Ricans just because they have voted Democrat in the past.”
READ MORE: Will anti-Trump Puerto Ricans storm Florida’s polls in November, or is it hype?
Exit polls indicate Trump won as much as 46% of the U.S. Latino vote last month — which would be a record for a Republican presidential candidate — or as low as 37%, which is still a remarkable haul for the GOP.
Still, even as Democrats keep losing more and more Latino voters like Cubans and Venezuelans, they considered Puerto Ricans, Florida’s second-largest Latino group and New York’s largest, the one bloc that would always stick with them — especially in South Florida.
But here, even many young Puerto Ricans — like an anonymous first-time voter in Parkland who sparked social media buzz on election day last month after talking to CNN — said they supported Trump.
After emphasizing that she was “definitely not OK” with the Puerto Rico remarks at Trump’s rally, she said was voting for Trump anyway:
“I’m OK with who I am. And at the end of the day I want to be able to have a better life in the future.”
“Democrats failed to see Puerto Ricans and Latinos as individuals. Republicans did a good job messaging to Puerto Ricans who feel disenfranchised.”
Robert Asencio
Most Puerto Ricans still vote Democrat. But that young woman’s remarks reflect the fact that, especially in this election cycle, economic issues drive Puerto Ricans’ votes as heavily as they influence any group — and drove an appreciable number of them to Trump.
That’s especially true among Puerto Ricans who have more recently arrived on the U.S. mainland, like those in Florida and especially central Florida, who tend to be more conservative than more well-established Puerto Ricans in New York.
“And so the Republicans keep telling them socialists — code for Democrats — are going to destroy the economy,” notes Eduardo Gamarra, a political science professor at Florida International University who has long studied the Puerto Rican vote and how it’s been evolving away from the Democrats in recent years.
Gamarra recalls 2017, after Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico. Tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans, who are U.S. citizens by birth, came to Florida.
Democrats were criticized for largely sitting back and waiting for a windfall of what they were sure would be Democratic votes — while then Governor Rick Scott and the Republicans pro-actively engaged the newcomers.
Welcoming centers
In a survey he conducted at the time for Nuestro Futuro (Our Future), a partnership of Puerto Rican advocacy groups, Gamarra found that “the recently arrived Puerto Ricans were saying that their number one problem was [learning] English, because they were linking English and career advancement, jobs, right?
“When I presented the findings to Democratic campaigns that year, they rejected them. But Scott began some English training programs.”
Scott also took steps like setting up welcoming centers for the Puerto Rican exodus at Florida’s major airports.
Gamarra believes the Puerto Rican votes Scott gained as a result helped him narrowly unseat incumbent Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson in 2018 — despite the fact that then President Trump was being widely criticized for cavalierly tossing paper towels at storm victims on a post-Maria visit to Puerto Rico the year before.
“The Democrats too often are running faculty-lounge campaigns, full of progressive abstractions,” Gamarra says, “and they’re not addressing the bread-and-butter kinds of issues with voters like Puerto Ricans.
“In Florida especially, they’re just not in the weeds with Latino voters like Puerto Ricans the way Republicans are these days.”
Puerto Rican salsa star Marc Anthony endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris in a video called “Recuerdo” (I Remember) criticizing Donald Trump’s treatment of Puerto Rico in his first presidency.
Many Puerto Rican political activists agree.
“The Republicans have done a very good job of messaging to Puerto Ricans who feel disenfranchised today,” says former Florida state Rep. Robert Asencio, a Miami Democrat.
“You’ve got to talk to the Puerto Ricans about their quality of life, right? You’ve got to inspire them. We felt left behind in the COVID economy like any other American group, man.”
In 2016, Asencio, a former Miami-Dade public schools police captain and army veteran, became the first South Florida Puerto Rican elected to the state legislature in half a century.
He believes a big reason the Democratic Party didn’t follow through with enough of that outreach this year is that it still too often considers Puerto Ricans and other Latino groups to be one, Democrat-voting monolith instead of the more complex if not balkanized demographic they actually are.
“The Democratic Party,” Asencio says, “has failed to see Puerto Ricans and the Latinos as individuals.”
Some have also questioned the Democrats’ push for endorsements from Puerto Rican celebrities like rapper Bad Bunny and salsa singer Marc Anthony (who made a video for the Democratic presidential candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, recalling Trump’s scornful treatment of Puerto Rico during his first presidency).
“There turned out to be not much more of a ‘Bad Bunny effect’ with Puerto Rican voters than there turned out to be a Taylor Swift effect with voters in general,” one Latino political expert told WLRN.
READ MORE: Boricua Boom: Can Puerto Ricans become the new Cubans of South Florida politics?
Democrats argue they and Harris’ team did spotlight Puerto Ricans in campaign ads in Pennsylvania, including one narrated by popular Puerto Rican radio personality Victor Martinez.
Still, community advocates says the party needs to look more closely at factors like the divisions among Puerto Ricans regarding whether the territory should become a state, an independent country or remain a U.S. commonwealth.
Another consideration critics say Democrats ignore: Puerto Rico’s more chaotic, non-binary party politics — which condition Puerto Ricans (who cannot vote in U.S. presidential elections on the island, but can if they reside on the U.S. mainland) to more often vote for the person than for a party.
“That’s how they learn to vote,” says Maruxa Cardenas, co-director of the Puerto Rican advocacy nonprofit La Mesa Boricua in Miami.
Cardenas also points out while the joke at Trump’s campaign rally last month was certainly insulting to Puerto Ricans, Democrats overestimated how it would affect the votes of Puerto Ricans who’ve come here largely to escape the island’s economic disaster and political dysfunction.
Either way, she says Democrats relied too much on nonprofits like hers to take care of the ground game with groups like Puerto Ricans — and it shouldn’t have waited until the moment of the Hinchcliffe joke controversy to specifically engage Puerto Ricans more seriously.
“They came in too late,” Cardenas says.
“There was a lot of lost engagement. You need to do this work all year round. Election or non-election year, you have to keep on working with the communities.”
Puerto Ricans say that’s a reality Democrats can no longer afford to joke around with.
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Publish date : 2024-12-04 02:01:00
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