In Crucial Florida, Puerto Rican Voters a Valuable Target

Growing in size and influence, the group can help deliver the sought-after Sunshine State to Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.

By Susan Milligan | Staff Writer Oct. 13, 2016, at 5:59 p.m.

ORLANDO, Fla. – Puerto Rico-born Kaisha Toledo had been living in Florida for a few months when a strange woman at the grocery store approached her.
Why was she speaking Spanish, the woman demanded of a startled Toledo.

"You're in America now. You have to speak English," Toledo recalls the woman saying before rolling her cart away.

That was two years ago, when the economic crisis in Puerto Rico forced the bilingual Toledo to give up her doctoral degree studies and move with her family to Florida to find work. She told the woman she understood that – but wondered if the fellow shopper didn't understand that Puerto Ricans are not immigrants, but U.S. citizens.

"It's so stressful that we, as American citizens, can feel like outsiders. Like we don't count," Toledo says. This election season, she – along with a fast-growing Puerto Rican community in Florida's central Interstate 4 corridor – is determined to let political candidates know they do indeed count.

Florida has long been home to a strong contingent of Hispanic voters, but the size and makeup of that demographic is changing – and in a way that currently favors Democrats.

Cubans in 1990 comprised nearly half of the state's share of eligible Hispanic voters, with Puerto Ricans making up a fourth, according to the Pew Research Center. By 2014, Puerto Ricans (who trend heavily Democratic in voting patterns) had ticked up to 27 percent, with Cuban-Americans dropping to 31 percent.

Puerto Ricans flocking to mainland could sway swing states

Further, the Cuban population is no longer as reliably GOP as it once was, experts note. The anti-Fidel Castro, older Cuban refugees are dying off, and younger Cuban-Americans are more likely to support lifting the U.S. embargo against the island country and to vote Democratic, polling trends show.

Meanwhile, Puerto Rico's fiscal crisis is leading droves of residents to relocate to the I-4 corridor, providing an enormous potential boost to Democrats, if they get out the vote. Unlike relocated Cubans, Puerto Ricans – who can vote in presidential primaries on the island – need only re-register at their new Florida addresses.

One of the beneficiaries of the demographic shift is expected to be Darren Soto, a state legislator who won his Democratic congressional primary in a lean-Democratic, central Florida district. If elected, Soto will become the state's first congressman from Puerto Rican heritage, following a series of Cuban-American members.

"It's absolutely an amazing point of pride to me to have a campaign that is the culmination of over 1 million Puerto Ricans coming in here" to the region, Soto says. "We are an up-and-coming political power, and this election shows we are hitting another level."

In theory, Hispanics of all origins should be gettable votes for Republicans, analysts say, since they tend to be Roman Catholic, very family oriented and invested in the American dream.

But disappointment with GOP attitudes toward immigration has soured the population against the party. And Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump's comments about Mexican immigrants – while not targeted at the Puerto Rican population – have offended many here who have taken them as an assault on the entire Hispanic community.

"Donald Trump has made comments he has yet to retract that a lot of us in general find insulting and to a certain degree, frightening," Soto says. "Even though we are citizens, we care, from a cultural and moral point of view, about immigration reform," he adds.

Trump has focused much of his Florida outreach on the Cuban-American vote, vowing to undo the executive measures taken by President Barack Obama that have eased relations with the communist isle.

That position earns him backing from the community's hard-liners, but it may be an outdated strategy, says Simon Rosenberg, founder of the New Democrat Network and an expert on the Hispanic vote.

"It's old-time religion; it's what you do when you're a Republican. But it's not a bet-positive in the state," Rosenberg says. A recent poll, for example, shows that 54 percent of Cuban-Americans in Miami-Dade County – a national hub for the Cuban-American population – favor lifting the embargo.

Trump also could be hurt by a report that, despite the embargo, one of his businesses paid $68,000 to a consulting company in the late 1990s to explore potential business opportunities in Cuba, notes Joe Garcia, a Democrat seeking to regain the Florida congressional seat he lost in 2014.

Uncertainty on the I-4: Puerto Rican voters eye hard choice

Garcia, who is of Cuban-born parents, was once executive director of the heavily pro-embargo Cuban American National Foundation, but now favors easing restrictions on travel to the island, something Obama has done. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, who supports lifting the Cuba embargo, is running a radio ad in Florida in which a Cuban-accented speaker blasts Trump for endorsing the embargo even as he considered doing work there.

The GOP contender also has done little to improve relations with the rest of the Sunshine State's Hispanics, Garcia says.

"I think that George W. Bush made some gains in the Hispanic community because he spoke to people about what they want: to succeed in America, so their families would have jobs and be allowed to work," Garcia says. "That works until you offend their children, until you say, 'You're not part of the [American] dream.'"

But disliking Trump – as Toledo says many in her community do – is not enough to convince people to turn out to vote, says Christina Hernandez of Organize Now, a progressive community organizing group that is aggressively registering Puerto Rican voters in central Florida.

Florida Puerto Ricans favor Clinton over Trump by a 74-17 percent margin, according to a Latino Decisions poll. But Latinos traditionally have underpunched their political weight in U.S. elections, meaning more effort has to be made to get them to cast ballots, organizers say.

"The outreach to the Hispanic community has been lacking. The Democratic Party has taken them for granted," says Hernandez, who did Latino outreach for the 2012 Obama campaign in Florida. She says Democratic campaigns tend to show up during election season, but need to pay more attention to Hispanic communities in between campaigns.

And reaching those voters requires a unique understanding and strategy, she notes. Puerto Ricans are very community- and family oriented, she says, and so are best contacted first in-person at events or places where they congregate.

Early balloting is also critical toward demystifying the process, Hernandez says. In Puerto Rico, people don't vote for such offices as sheriff or school board member, so a long ballot can be intimidating to a Puerto Rican voter. And since the parties on the island largely boil down to three stances – pro-statehood, pro-commonwealth and pro-independence – the Democrat/Republican divide doesn't help with the decision-making process, she says.

Trump Support Among Latinos Continues to Slide
Further, Puerto Ricans who come to the mainland U.S. from the island often leave their cars, meaning they don't have transportation to the polls. That all adds up to a strategy that encourages Puerto Ricans to apply for an early ballot they can take home, study and fill out at their leisure.

For voters like Toledo, who at 41 is voting in a presidential general election for the first time in her life, the 2016 race is not just about Clinton vs. Trump. It's the start of a longer American life.

"For Puerto Ricans, this campaign is not just about this election. It's about going forward," she says.

And after feeling neglected by politicians, community members are poised to become a powerful force in the state – if they vote.

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