In Orlando, Obama urges Puerto Ricans to cast early ballots
PUERTO RICANS ARE NOT USED TO VOTING BY MAIL. MANY OF THOSE [ABSENTEE] BALLOTS HAVE JUST BEEN LEFT AT HOME.
Maria Revelles, a Puerto Rican community organizer in Central Florida
In an election where an unprecedented rush to vote before Election Day is raising Democrats’ hopes of defeating President Donald Trump in his must-win home state, a key segment of Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s Florida winning coalition is bucking the trend: Puerto Ricans.
Democrats are on pace to shatter records for ballots cast before Election Day. But the party’s turnout has been disproportionately older and whiter. And while Hispanic turnout is up over 2016, those numbers are being driven by conservative-leaning Cuban-Americans in Miami rather than left-leaning Puerto Ricans in Central Florida.
But to win Florida, Biden will need a stronger showing over the final week of the election from Puerto Ricans, part of a growing group of non-Cuban Hispanics, often with no party affiliation.
The election “is not going to be decided by the Democrats or the Republicans,” said former Republican state Rep. Bob Cortes, whose former district is in purple and increasingly Hispanic Seminole County.
“It’s going to be completely and absolutely decided by the independent and Hispanic vote.”
To shift turnout in Central Florida, the Biden campaign sent former President Barack Obama to Orlando, the center of a community of hundreds of thousands of Puerto Rican voters.
Democrats have hoped the influx of left-leaning Latinos will help change the political dynamic along Interstate 4, a battleground region that Trump won decisively four years ago. Polls show that many Puerto Ricans registered to vote in Florida strongly dislike Trump following his handling of 2017’s Hurricane Maria.
“When a hurricane devastates Puerto Rico, a president’s supposed to help it rebuild, not toss paper towels, withhold billions of dollars in aid until just before an election,” Obama said Saturday during a speech in North Miami. “We’ve got a president who actually suggested selling Puerto Rico.”
But dislike of Trump doesn’t necessarily translate into a vote for Biden. And so far, turnout by Democrats in the two Central Florida counties with the highest number of voting Puerto Ricans — Orange and Osceola — is lagging behind the Democratic Party’s state averages in early and mail ballot turnout by about 2.5 percentage points.
Osceola’s turnout among independents has been even worse. Most voters without party affiliation in Osceola are Hispanic. Only 28.4% of independent voters in the county had voted as of Monday morning, compared to 45.5% of Democrats and 43.5% of Republicans.
Cortes, who is Puerto Rican, said the Boricua voter bloc is “not organized,” and said civic participation remains low due to experiences with Puerto Rico’s tumultuous and scandalplagued government. He blamed his loss in 2018 on low turnout among Central Florida’s Hispanics in an election even though other Republican candidates like Sen. Rick Scott showed an ability to over-perform expectations in heavily Puerto Rican communities.
“A lot of folks that came from Puerto Rico after Maria have a total distrust in government overall because of the experience they had in Puerto Rico,” said Cortes, who has previously spoken at Trump campaign events in Central Florida.
To turn out Puerto Ricans and other Biden-leaning
Hispanic voters, the Biden campaign and its allies continue to spend heavily on Spanish-language ads on TV, as well as on radio and in print publications. They’ve also funded a late-arriving field operation to compete with the Trump campaign’s ground game and get campaign foot soldiers on the phone and in front of voters to encourage them to vote.
Maria Revelles, a Puerto Rican community organizer in Central Florida, said that after a massive push to get Latinos to request a mail ballot, many of the homes she knocks on these days say that they did get them. They’re just not sending them in.
“But what’s the wild card here?” she said. “Puerto Ricans are not used to voting by mail. Many of those ballots have just been left at home.”
Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory, and residents on the island cannot vote in presidential elections. But Puerto Ricans can vote for president if they are residing on the mainland.
“Being from the island, we really are detached from national politics. ... In my room, I have an Obama ‘08 poster, but I was too little,” said Steven Ramos, a 25year-old Biden volunteer based in Puerto Rico. “Puerto Ricans are learning to understand that we’re 1.3 million voters in Florida.
And we have power and we demand influence.”