Puerto Rico’s roughly 3 million residents cannot vote for the U.S. president. But nearly twice as many Puerto Ricans live in states like Pennsylvania, New York and Florida, and they can.
El Nuevo Día, the island’s newspaper of record, on Tuesday called on members of the Puerto Rican diaspora to vote for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris over her Republican opponent, Donald Trump.
“Trump has for years maintained a discourse of contempt and misinformation against the island that reveals an obsession and disdain for a people who do not have the power of the vote to defend themselves, since the three million American citizens who live in Puerto Rico cannot vote in the presidential elections,” María Luisa Ferré Rangel, the head of the media group that owns the daily newspaper, wrote in an editorial. “However, the other five million who live in the United States, whom they also labeled as trash, can vote.”
The majority of Puerto Ricans living in the U.S. reside in electorally uncompetitive states such as New York and Florida. But as many as 500,000 live in Pennsylvania, a hotly contested state where President Joe Biden won by just 80,000 votes in 2020.
The endorsement came two days after comedian Tony Hinchcliffe performed a set at a Trump rally in Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden.
“There’s a lot going on. I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico,” Hinchcliffe said at Sunday’s event, to muted applause and jeers.
The remark reignited many Puerto Ricans’ longstanding anger at Trump for his mishandling of the aftermath of 2017’s Hurricane Maria, the Category 5 storm from which the island’s infrastructure has yet to fully recover. In one infamous televised moment, Trump showed up at an emergency relief center to chuck rolls of paper towels at a crowd waiting to gather supplies.
His administration then limited relief funds to the U.S. territory, stymying reconstruction and allowing Puerto Rico to languish without electricity for 11 months, the second-longest blackout in world history. Trump went on to ask his secretary of homeland security at the time whether the U.S. could sell Puerto Rico, which the U.S. has considered a “possession” of the American government since seizing the island as a colony and military outpost following the Spanish-American War of 1898.
“Let’s not forget the paper towels he threw at us while we suffered without electricity for months, and let’s not forget that the funds did not arrive because Trump ― through the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development ― told them to stop because he considered Puerto Ricans ‘bums who live begging,’” read the editorial in El Nuevo Día. “It is cowardly to insult those who cannot defend themselves.”
Harris drew criticism during her first visit to Puerto Rico in March, when she attended a fundraiser held by English-speaking Americans who relocated to the island to take advantage of a controversial tax haven scheme that frees new residents from paying any levy on income. In a moment that seemed to show the vice president as out of touch, she was filmed clapping along to a song protesting against her.
Harris, Tuesday’s editorial concluded, “is not perfect.” But amid weekly if not daily power outages in some areas, the Biden administration has established key task forces in the federal government to speed up the reconstruction of a critical electrical grid. And Biden’s secretary of energy, Jennifer Granholm, has made repeated visits to the island to oversee those efforts.
During the Trump rally on Sunday, the Harris campaign put out a video of the Democratic nominee pledging to create another task force to promote economic opportunity on the island.
“It’s about giving people access to opportunity, knowing that the people in all communities — in all communities — they want, yes, a job, but they want to be able to build wealth,” Harris said, according to a White House press pool report. “They want to be able to build intergenerational wealth, home ownership, small business growth, right? So I call it an opportunity economy. The thing I mentioned this morning is I’m going to create basically an opportunity economy Task Force for Puerto Rico.”
Noting that “we may not fully know all aspects of the candidate due to the fact that she entered the race three months before the election,” El Nuevo Día nevertheless applauded Harris for being “courageous enough to step forward and accept the challenge.”
“Today we urge all those who love our beautiful island, the land of the sea and the sun, not to lend their vote to Donald Trump,” the editorial concluded. “To all Puerto Ricans who can vote in this upcoming United States election and represent those of us who cannot: Vote for Kamala Harris.”