NAZARETH, Pa. — Pennsylvania Democrats believe comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s insulting remarks about Puerto Rico at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Oct. 27 are already helping turn out Puerto Rican voters who might have otherwise stayed home in this critical swing state.
Out of the seven battleground states that will decide the winner of Tuesday’s election between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, Pennsylvania has the largest population of Puerto Ricans. The Keystone State’s nearly 500,000-person Puerto Rican population is concentrated in North Philadelphia, the Lehigh Valley, Reading and Hazleton.
The same day Hinchcliffe’s remarks shook the political firmament, Harris had been campaigning in the Puerto Rican community in North Philadelphia.
“I have heard from the Puerto Rican community directly about how much they were offended” by Hinchcliffe’s remarks, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) said Saturday while campaigning for Anna Thomas, a Democratic running for Pennsylvania state representative. “I think it woke up the community in a way that is going to turn them out in even greater numbers for Kamala Harris.”
Pressed to explain why these remarks might resonate with voters who are not already firmly in one corner, when so many other Trump or Trump-related comments have failed to damage him, Shapiro said, “This is my sense from being all over the state: that it broke through, and it resonated in a way with the community, where it made them say, ‘Well, wait a minute, that guy’s not for us. That guy doesn’t respect us.’”
“They keep saying, ‘Oh, he’s only a comedian.’ It still hurts.”
- Nilsa Vega, Pennsylvania voter
State Rep. Josh Siegel (D), who represents Allentown, a city that’s a Puerto Rican hub, and Lamont McClure, executive of Northampton County, had similar assessments at the campaign event on Saturday.
“It’s had an undeniable impact on the ground here in the Lehigh Valley,” Siegel said.
Reached by phone on Saturday, Philadelphia City Council member Quetcy Lozada (D), who is Puerto Rican, said her office had received messages from people who voted for Trump and wanted to know if they could change their votes. (They cannot.)
Lozada, who accompanied Harris to a Puerto Rican restaurant while she was campaigning in North Philadelphia, has also heard from many constituents who say their friends and relatives were either leaning toward Trump or were not planning on voting until they heard about Hinchcliffe’s insult. It’s a marked change from the mixed results Lozada had gotten some days while door-knocking for Harris in parts of North Philadelphia before Hinchcliffe’s remarks.
“I’ve seen a huge level of anger and feeling of disrespect,” Lozada said. “I think we will see folks who were undecided up until just this week turn out for Harris. We are going to see Puerto Ricans come out in record numbers to demand to be respected. And they’re going to demand that through their vote.”
Strategists from both major parties are still reeling from a critical moment in Trump’s xenophobia-filled rally on Oct. 27 that Democrats hope could provide a marginal advantage in the final days. While delivering a comedy set filled with racist jokes, Hinchcliffe, a comedian based in Austin, Texas, described Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean.”
In a rally full of nativist and racist remarks, Hinchcliffe’s comments nonetheless stood out for the politically important constituency they offended. Republican-elected officials from Florida and other Puerto Rican-heavy states and districts rushed to condemn the remarks. Puerto Rican pop stars Bad Bunny, Jennifer Lopez and Ricky Martin responded that night by sharing a Harris video appeal to Puerto Rican voters.
The Trump campaign took the rare step of distancing him from the insulting comedy set, saying that the “joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”
But Trump’s Puerto Rican critics have faulted him for failing to apologize or to condemn Hinchcliffe’s remarks right away while taking the podium.
“I specifically asked the audience, ‘OK, what about if Trump today, all of a sudden, decides to apologize … Would that be OK? Would you take that in consideration?’” Victor Martinez, host of a Spanish-language morning radio show popular throughout Pennsylvania, said on CNN on Tuesday. “Overwhelmingly, everybody was like, ‘Nope, too late.’”
Seeking to capitalize on the blowback Trump has gotten, the Harris campaign dispatched the vice president’s sister, Maya Harris, and Puerto Rican musical theater artist Lin-Manuel Miranda to rally Puerto Rican voters at the Puerto Rican Beneficial Society in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, on Thursday. Harris is due to hold a rally in neighboring Allentown on Monday afternoon.
HuffPost spoke with several Puerto Rican voters outside of a CTown Supermarket on Bethlehem’s south side, across the street from the Puerto Rican Beneficial Society.
Nilsa Vega and Neidel Pacheco of Hellertown, a borough south of Bethlehem, both said they had never voted before, but Hinchcliffe’s remarks were the reason they planned to vote for Harris on Tuesday.
“That hit the spot right there,” Vega said. “They keep saying, ‘Oh, he’s only a comedian.’ It still hurts.”
Pacheco saw Trump’s decision to pose in a garbage truck at a campaign stop in Wisconsin the following day as an additional insult. “If he didn’t have nothing to do with it, what’s he doing in the garbage truck?” Pacheco asked.
Sergio Martinez, a warehouse worker from Bethlehem, said he had never voted before and is torn about whether to vote now. He thinks Trump “kept the country strong — as far as economy-wise — and kept the borders a little tighter.”
But Martinez has reservations about Trump because he has “ways of saying things about immigrants and just other than white [people]. So that’s kind of like a little iffy about that.”
Martinez was less fazed about Hinchcliffe’s remarks. However, his mother, who never votes, is planning to vote for Harris because of the joke.
“It definitely impacted,” Martinez said. “Everybody’s telling everybody, ‘Don’t vote for him.’”