The following article by James Hohmann with Breanne Deppisch and Joanie Greve was posted on the Washington Post website September 28, 2017:
THE BIG IDEA: More than 50 million ballots were cast by Floridians in the seven presidential elections from 1992 through 2016. If you add them all up, only 18,000 votes separate the Republicans from the Democrats. That is 0.04 percent.
Florida is rightfully considered the swingiest of swing states.Control of the White House in 2000 came down to a few hundredhanging chads – and one vote on the Supreme Court. The past four statewide elections – two governor’s races and two presidentials – were all decided by a single percentage point.
So it could be quite politically significant that tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans, maybe more, are expected to permanently move into Florida as the result of Hurricane Maria. The Category 4 storm has wreaked havoc on the U.S. territory of 3.4 million. Most of the island still doesn’t have power a week after Maria made landfall. There are shortages of fuel, medicine, food and running water. Infrastructure that was already crumbling is in ruins.
Puerto Ricans are American citizens, thanks to a law passed in 1917. As a result, all they need to settle in the mainland is a plane ticket or a berth on a boat.
Their citizenship entitles them to vote, and they tend to overwhelmingly support Democratic candidates.
Florida-based Republican operative Rick Wilson thinks the hurricane might be a game changer. “If you put an influx of 100,000 Puerto Ricans who vote Democratic eight times out of 10 in the Orlando area, there you go,” he said. “Nobody can afford a big change in the registration pattern or a change in the voting pattern that offsets Florida’s narrowness. You could end up with a big advantage for Democrats in 2018 if they play it right. The Puerto Ricans would be coming here because they feel like Donald Trump left them high and dry. That won’t fade away. … It could be a very, very big deal.”
Hurricane Katrina had an impact on Texas politics because almost half a million people, mostly African Americans, relocated there from the New Orleans area. “It made Louisiana more red and Texas a bit more blue,” said Wilson, who has long been critical of Trump. “Texas could absorb it.”
“I don’t know if you can say this changes the whole demographic game,” said Democratic strategist Steve Schale, who directed Barack Obama’s Florida campaign in 2008 and was a senior adviser in 2012. “There are still 20 million people, so a couple hundred thousand here or there isn’t a huge deal. But, at the margins, everything matters! It doesn’t take a lot.”
San Juan mayor: ‘There is horror in the streets’
— Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has told the White House that the federal government needs to quickly take over recovery efforts on the island to prevent a Hurricane “Katrina-style” disaster. “This has the potential of being a serious humanitarian crisis in a U.S. territory impacting United States citizens,” Rubio told Politico’s Marc Caputo on Tuesday after returning from a trip to inspect the dire situation in San Juan.
— The number of people of Puerto Rican origin living in Florida already surpassed 1 million in 2015, which is more than double what it was in 2000. Cuban Americans now represent less than one-third of Florida’s eligible Hispanic voters.
A deep recession on the island, combined with a crime wave, caused an exodus to Florida. Puerto Rico’s population declined by 7 percent from 2010 to 2015, or roughly 300,000 people. The island’s government, saddled with $73 billion in debt, declared bankruptcy in May. Maria may supercharge these long-term trends and prompt many who had been trying to hold on to finally give up and flee.
They have primarily settled in the Orlando metropolitan area, which is part of the pivotal Interstate 4 corridor. “Because so many Puerto Ricans have already migrated here, it is easier now,” said Schale, who is based in Tallahassee. “They have homes to go to and support networks in place, which also makes it easier to stay.”
Trump under pressure over Puerto Rico hurricane relief
— Frustration stemming from Trump’s initially lackadaisical response to Hurricane Maria might make these new voters even more antagonistic to the GOP. The president has resisted opening up the port of San Juan to foreign ships, for example, and he hasn’t appeared as worried about the damage as he was when he went to Texas for Hurricane Harvey and Florida for Hurricane Irene.
Trump has been pilloried in the Spanish-language press for launching a culture war against the NFL amidst the suffering in Puerto Rico. He tweeted more than a dozen times over the weekend about the national anthem, but he was silent and seemed unsympathetic about the damage from the hurricane.
On Monday night, pop star Marc Anthony tweeted angrily at the president: “Mr. President shut the [expletive] up about NFL. Do something about our people in need in #PuertoRico. We are American citizens too.” The post quickly got more than 89,000 retweets and 221,000 likes. Other Latino celebrities like Ricky Martin, Pitbull and Jennifer Lopez also tried to call more public attention to the misery on the ground.
“On Monday when we realized that the president had spent the weekend fighting with football players and their mothers, we realized, ‘Wait a minute. This guy hasn’t said anything about us,’” said Luis A. Miranda, a Democratic consultant in New York who is of Puerto Rican descent. “What crystalized it was Marc Anthony’s tweet. … Trump’s tweets are red meat for the third of the country – his base – that is the only thing that he has left. A tweet about Puerto Rico is not good red meat for his base, so he’d rather fight about the American flag and what African American athletes do to raise consciousness.”
Miranda is a board member of the Latino Victory Project, which helps identify and assist Latino candidates running for office. (He’s also the father of Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of “Hamilton.”) He said it is crucial for Democrats to capitalize on the new wave of immigrants. “We have to register people and we need to give them good reasons to vote,” said Miranda. “We cannot just go to them three months before the election and say, ‘Vote Democratic,’ or ’Vote for this candidate.’ … Something that energizes people a bit is when there are good Latino candidates.”
Trump: ‘Puerto Rico is going to need a lot of money’
— In the face of growing criticism and devastating visuals on cable news, the administration is finally ratcheting up its response. “In the first six days after the hurricane made landfall … the Navy had deployed just two ships, citing concerns that Puerto Rico’s ports were too damaged to accommodate numerous large vessels. But harrowing reports of isolated U.S. citizens struggling in the heat without electricity and running low on food and water have now spurred the Pentagon to throw resources into the relief effort,” The Post’s Arelis R. Hernández, Dan Lamothe, Ed O’Keefe and Joel Achenbach report on the front page of today’s paper. “The more robust approach includes the deployment of the USNS Comfort, a hospital ship that has responded to other natural disasters. The Pentagon also has assigned an Army general as point person for the humanitarian crisis: Brig. Gen. Richard C. Kim …
- “Puerto Rican officials said that 10 military vessels are en route to the island and that half should arrive within 48 hours. A ship arrived Tuesday with 262,000 barrels of fuel for distribution to gas stations across the island.
- “The Pentagon’s effort to date remains smaller than relief operations marshaled after other major natural disasters, including Katrina in 2005 and the 2013 typhoon that devastated the Philippines. In those cases, the military established a joint task force led by a three-star general.”
— Leading Florida Republicans have been taking this crisis much more seriously than the White House since the beginning. They clearly recognize the political risk of antagonizing a political bloc this big in their own backyard.
Gov. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who may challenge Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson next year, is flying to Puerto Rico today to help coordinate recovery efforts on the island. “On Tuesday Scott placed the National Guard on standby to help Puerto Rico,” the Orlando Sentinel reports. “He visited Kissimmee on Wednesday to meet with volunteers helping Maria recovery efforts.”
Former governor Jeb Bush has been posting stories about the devastation on social media. “Time to take it up several notches,” he tweeted yesterday, linking to a story about people being unable to get medical care on the island. On Monday, Bush retweeted this post from a former governor of Puerto Rico:
Republicans also see opportunities to make inroads with Puerto Ricans. They tend to identify as socially conservative, and while they vote for Democrats they don’t strongly identify with the party.
The LIBRE Initiative, which is part of the Koch network, has spent millions trying to engage with the Puerto Rican community across Florida over the past few years. The effort tries to give Latinos tools for upward mobility, such as offering English classes in Orlando, Kissimmee and Miami. The group is working to help new arrivals from Puerto Rico with training for job interviews, etc.
— The types of Puerto Ricans coming in this new wave are likely to look slightly different than the ones who came before. The average immigrant who has come in recent years tended to be younger: searching for jobs and opportunities. “You’re going to see a lot of frail people or elderly people with health needs who will be overrepresented in this flow,” said Edwin Meléndez, the director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College in New York. “The health infrastructure has crumbled. … It will continue to be younger people searching for employment, but across the board it will also be more people who are dependent on government to survive.”
Meléndez expects a lot of retirees to come to Florida who have heretofore been reluctant to leave their hometowns. “People can’t talk to their families right now, but the minute people can get through to their families, they’re going to start buying them airplane tickets to get out of there,” he said. “It’s chain migration. … Florida is kind to the elderly. People have the same Social Security card, whether they’re here or in Puerto Rico.”
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