‘Your vote, your voice, your future’
U.S. mainland politicians wooing Puerto Ricans who fled storm
A small street festival outside Miami features booths adorned with Puerto Rican flags. A band plays salsa music as vendors offer specialties from the Caribbean island such as rice with pork and chickpeas. There’s also a woman working her way through the crowd with a clipboard, her white T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Your vote, your voice, your future.”
She’s searching for people like Shaimir Berrios, a 28-year-old who recently relocated to South Florida from Puerto Rico but has not yet registered for the upcoming U.S. elections. That makes her a prized commodity in what is expected to be a midterm election season with many close races.
Berrios, selling natural soaps from one of the booths, moved to Florida in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria and she’s eager to vote for the first time in a mainland election to show her anger over what she views as a tepid response by the U.S. federal government to the Sept. 20 storm that devastated the island.
“People have to look for change because it affects us. We have to get involved,” she said, filling out the paperwork to register on a recent Sunday.
The intensity of political attention is new for Puerto Ricans, who are accustomed to not having much political clout. While they are U.S. citizens, they cannot vote in the presidential election while on the island, which is a territory not a state. Their single representative in the House of Representatives has only limited voting power and they have no senators. But their votes have the same weight as other Americans when they move to the mainland, as hundreds of thousands have done over the past decade, first because of a deep economic recession and then because of Hurricane Maria.
Political operatives, pollsters and politicians in at least four states are working hard to find people like Berrios, Puerto Ricans who are eligible to vote and whose party affiliation may be up for grabs. The efforts are particularly aggressive in Florida, where tens of thousands of people from the island relocated after the hurricane, but political types are also busy in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Connecticut.
In Florida, where Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by about one percentage point and Hispanic turnout was lower than expected, the votes of Puerto Ricans are potentially valuable in upcoming congressional and statewide races, said Susan McManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa.
“The bottom line is that mobilizing and getting out the vote of the Puerto Ricans is going to be critical,” she said.
At least 450,000 Puerto Ricans moved to the U.S. mainland over the past decade, causing the island’s population to drop for the first time in modern history. It now has about 3.4 million people. How many have permanently relocated because of Hurricane Maria is not yet known, but estimates range from 115,000 to 200,000. There are now about 5.3 million Puerto Ricans on the U.S. mainland and they are concentrated in the Northeast and Florida.
The recent street festival in the Miami suburb of Kendall is just one of many get-out-the-vote efforts aimed at Puerto Ricans. Organizers of the event said they are not affiliated with any party and voter registration was conducted by volunteers with the non-partisan League of Women Voters.
“We are just working so the Puerto Rican community can have its voice heard,” the volunteer, Marisol Zenteno, said as she took a break from working a line of people waiting to buy pork and rice. “They have the right when they come here to vote.”
But others are overtly partisan efforts.
The Republican Party has hired three people to take charge of reaching out to displaced Puerto Ricans and to defend the Trump administration’s response to the disaster and remind voters of the more than US$20 billion in aid.
“It’s an important vote for us,” said Yali Nunez, a Republican National Committee spokeswoman.
The Democratic Party is registering Puerto Ricans, especially in Florida, and has a “voter education program” aimed at helping people who fled Maria and at winning their vote, spokesman Francisco Pelayo said. The Latino Victory Fund, a nationwide Hispanic outreach effort co-founded by actress Eva Longoria, is also working to mobilize people who fled the island.
A conservative effort is combining education and politics. The LIBRE Institute, which is funded by the billionaire activist Koch brothers, offers “Welcome to Florida” classes aimed at newly arrived Puerto Ricans. They teach English and job-hunting skills, concluding with a pitch for what Cesar Grajales describes as “freemarket” principles.
“We don’t talk about candidates, but we do talk about public policies,” said Grajales, who is director of coalitions at the LIBRE Initiative, a parent organization.