Puerto Rican voters in the United States have suddenly emerged as a key voting bloc in the aftermath of a comedian's remarks about the island at a Donald Trump rally in New York City on Sunday, The Hill reported.
Tony Hinchcliffe, who goes by the stage name "Kill Tony," likened Puerto Rico to a "floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now" in the run-up of speakers ahead of Trump's speech at Madison Square Garden.
His joke ignited outrage among many Puerto Ricans, Hispanics and the political left, thrusting the potential impact of the Puerto Rican vote on Election Day next Tuesday into the spotlight. The campaign for Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris seized on the moment, releasing an ad aimed at Puerto Ricans using footage of Hinchcliffe's remarks.
"I think that this can and could make a big difference with Puerto Ricans who were already anti-Trump but were not sold yet or were soft on Kamala," Federico de Jesús, former deputy director of the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration, told The Hill. "They might be voting for her, but they weren't enthusiastic. I think that this will create rage, anger and motivate people to go out and maybe volunteer. Maybe take their relatives to vote."
An estimated 5.8 million Puerto Ricans were living in the United States in 2021, according to census data. What's not clear is what percentage of them were voting age.
According to the 2020 census, Florida was home to 1.15 million Puerto Ricans, but Connecticut had the highest percentage of Puerto Ricans, at 8% of the population. However, neither is a swing state in 2024.
Pennsylvania, however, was home to more than 456,000 Puerto Ricans in 2020, 3.6% of that state's population. The battleground states of Wisconsin (1.1%), North Carolina (1.1%), Georgia (1%), Nevada (0.9%), Arizona (0.6%) and Michigan (0.4%) were all much smaller in population percentage let alone voting age Puerto Ricans.
But given the slim margins of victory that are being projected in the battlegrounds next week, those Puerto Rican populations could impact the result, according to the report.
"The fact that there's so many Puerto Ricans, more than 100,000 in Georgia, for example, more than that in North Carolina and obviously in Pennsylvania and in Wisconsin, that changes things," de Jesus told The Hill.