GOP tries to bring in Puerto Rican voters
Democrats working to get them registered
Every two years Florida Democrats and independent progressive groups have talked about how they’re going all out to register Hispanic voters, especially Puerto Ricans, and get them to the polls.
And every two years they look back on the disappointing results and promise to do better the next time around.
Republicans made gains with the Puerto Rican community in 2018 and especially in 2020. Now, a year out from the governor, U.S. Senate and congressional elections in 2022, Democrats are on the verge of losing their longheld registration advantage over Republicans in Florida.
It’s happening as Democrats and progressive groups are facing new challenges stemming from the controversial GOP election law that make canvassing and registering people more perilous.
Many Democrats had assumed that the influx of Puerto Ricans to Florida following the devastating Hurricane Maria in 2017 would help the party in the upcoming elections.
But in 2018, then-Gov. Rick Scott did well enough in Osceola County, getting almost 42% of the vote compared with Republican Connie Mack’s 31% in 2012, to defeat incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson by just about 10,000 votes statewide.
Scott had continuously reminded Puerto Rican voters of his trips to the island, and Nelson was criticized by some Hispanic groups for a lackluster Puerto Rican outreach.
In 2020, Osceola saw a 10% upswing in Puerto Rican voters for then-President Donald Trump compared with 2016, one of the largest in the country. Notably, some of the biggest gains by Trump elsewhere were in other Hispanic areas such as Miami-Dade County and southern Texas.
“It mirrors what you see nationally,” said Jorge Bonilla, a former Republican congressional candidate in District 9.
“In Osceola County, Trump overperformed his 2016 numbers, just like you saw in the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas.”
Trump’s handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, which included denying the official death toll of nearly 3,000, “vanished very quickly as an issue,” Bonilla said.
“The Democrats tried to make it an issue, and they banged that drum in 2018, [but] It didn’t work,” he said. “They tried to bang the drum again in 2020. And it did not work because the Puerto Rican voter is savvy and knows when they are being pandered to.”
Helen Aguirre Ferre, executive director of the Republican Party of Florida, said Republicans were doing better with Puerto Ricans in part because of cultural and religious issues, including opposition to abortion.
“They are a strong, faithful community,” Ferre said. “Religion is critical to family and community. And we have always been supportive of those issues.”
Ferre quoted a famous statement from Ronald Reagan.
“‘Hispanics are Republicans, they just don’t know it yet’ — well, I think they know it now,” she said. “And they are growing in recognition of that fact.”
‘A hurdle there’
Liberal Puerto Rican groups, meanwhile, have fretted over the power of conservative Spanish language radio.
Jimmy Torres Velez, founder of the progressive group Boricua Vota, said Central Florida radio is not as powerful as what has been seen in South Florida, where some hosts and stations have been cited by studies as sources of disinformation about the 2020 election and COVID-19. However, their influence is growing.
“They repeated and repeated and repeated that [Democrats] are ‘killing babies,’ ” Torres Velez said, adding that he has also heard false claims about transgender people attacking children.
“That kind of line coming from the Republican Party is obscene and really hurt people. … And now they’re repeating out there that people should not get vaccinated.”
He said Democrats need to be more aggressive in countering such narratives in the Hispanic community.
“They should have people that speak Spanish on their staff that could go onto the radio and tell the story of what they’re doing,” Torres Velez said. “You have to have a press conference every other week explaining what you’re doing in Spanish.”
Most worrisome, he added, are the new restrictions on canvassing signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis earlier this year.
Canvassers face fines of $500 to $1,000 for applications not directly submitted to the supervisor of a person’s home county within 14 days, meaning mistakes could be costly. They are also required to warn new registrants that they may not deliver the form in time.
“The rules are very strong,” Torres Velez said. “It’s not easy for the canvasser to ... [avoid] getting into the dangerous area of being fined.”
Jared Nordland of Hispanic civil rights group UnidosUS said its goal of 70,000 registrations in Florida was reached in 2020 despite COVID, largely thanks to online registrations.
But it was too early to see what impact the new law has.
“In the past, we’ve overcome whenever there’s been a change [in the laws],” Nordland said. “We need to figure out what we need to do to be compliant …. I think there’s definitely a hurdle there.”
Falling through the cracks
Registering voters and getting them to the polls is the key problem for Democrats and liberal groups. High-profile registration efforts such as the one backed by former gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum have fallen apart, and previous efforts have not fully met goals.
As of mid-September, the GOP was less than 25,000 voters behind Democrats, at 5.11 million to the Democrats’ 5.13 million. This comes after there had been 700,000 more Democrats than Republicans when Barack Obama won the state in 2008, according to Politico.
Dan Smith, chair of political science at the University of Florida, said Puerto Rican voters tend to “fall through the cracks” of registration efforts for several reasons, especially after the COVID19 pandemic paused door-todoor canvassing.
While naturalized citizens are helped to register right after their ceremonies, he said, there’s no similar event for Puerto Ricans because they’re already U.S. citizens. And while incoming residents from other states can register after they get their drivers’ licenses, many Puerto Ricans who have come to Florida don’t switch their licenses because it’s unclear how long they’re going to stay. And anyone who wants to register online must first have a Florida driver’s license.
“So you have this population who are registerable but not easily registered,” Smith said. “And these third-party voter registration organizations that are on the ground have had this unprecedented barrier called COVID hampering their ability to register people.
“So there’s a major shift in terms of the ability, not only for the Democratic Party but a lot of voter registration groups to be able to do what they’ve always done in the past.”
No to ‘translate and send’
While exact numbers of Puerto Rican voters are hard to pin down because of a fluctuating population, “we know that the Osceola County, Orange County, Polk County and Seminole County have grown exponentially compared with the rest of the state because of the Census data,” Smith said.
And all those counties have large Puerto Rican populations, with the latest American Community Survey estimate as of 2019 showing about 385,000 Puerto Ricans in Orange, Osceola, Seminole and Lake.
But, Smith added, while Democrats are about to fall behind the GOP in registrations, much of that could be attributed to reliable Democratic voters who nonetheless register as independents.
“Hispanic voters in Florida, Puerto Rican or otherwise, are disproportionately more likely to register as ‘no party affiliation’ than with the Republican Party or the Democratic Party,” Smith said. “And that’s where this narrowing of the gap has happened. Many of these individuals would in the past register with the Democratic Party.”
Florida Democratic spokesman Jose Parra argued that despite GOP gains “the bulk of the Puerto Rican community leans Democrat. So it’s a question of them getting accustomed to the cycles here in the US.”
He said the party has learned from its 2018 and 2020 post-mortems and is ensuring “the Puerto Rican viewpoint is heard within the party.” That includes hiring more Puerto Rican and Spanish-speaking staff.
“The main thing is to meet the Puerto Rican community where they’re at,” he said. “You need to meet them in language, you need to meet them in culture, you need to ensure that when you’re designing materials for them, they are culturally relevant.
“‘Translate and send’ is not going to cut it here. And we are cognizant of that.”