KISSIMMEE, Florida — Puerto Rican-born Osceola County Commissioner Viviana Janer gave a full-throated endorsement of President-elect Joe Biden this election cycle.
So she was surprised when President Trump gained 5 to 7 points in the predominantly Puerto Rican county near Orlando.
She blames the Democrats.
“You can’t treat all Hispanics, all Latinos, with the same message,” Janer told the Washington Examiner over a cup of Cuban coffee with milk at Buchito’s sandwich shop in downtown Kissimmee.
“You have to customize to those subsets of the community that you are engaging their vote,” she insisted.
Janer said she “spoke very loudly” about Trump’s perceived ill-treatment of Puerto Ricans after the hurricane as well as of issues where the president is perceived to be weak, including the pandemic response and healthcare.
Cuban American Kissimmee Mayor Jose Alvarez told the Washington Examiner that Biden’s outreach to Hispanics in Florida failed.
“The message was so uniform, so they put us all in the same place,” he said.
Hurricane refugee Mayda Zaragoza is one of the thousands of Puerto Ricans who flooded into the Orlando suburbs after surviving Puerto Rico’s Hurricane Maria in 2017.
Instead of a booming tourism economy, she saw the highest unemployment in Florida and long lines for COVID-19 testing.
“The line was immense,” Zaragoza, 52, told the Washington Examiner outside Taino’s Bakery, where salsa music blares and Puerto Ricans pick up guava-filled pastries in the morning and mofongo, a traditional fried plantain dish, for dinner.
Zaragoza, her husband, and one of her two daughters left Puerto Rico after the Category 5 hurricane for jobs in the heavily Puerto Rican county, which has more Puerto Ricans per capita than anywhere outside the island.
She attributes the problems to Trump.
“He’s a little — rough,” she said. “He came to Puerto Rico after the hurricane and threw paper towels at us. It was insulting.”
“For Trump, I was not going to vote!” she said.
Before the election, she recalled seeing a poll of likely Puerto Rican voters heavily favoring Biden. Therefore, she didn’t worry about getting an absentee ballot when she left the state to visit family on Election Day.
She simply didn’t vote.
In the end, Trump made gains in the Puerto Rican population in Osceola, Orange, and Seminole counties, which surround Orlando, trimming points off the 2016 Democratic victory here and paving the way for future Republican gains, according to Florida election experts.
“Those Puerto Rican districts voted for Biden, just like they did for [Hillary] Clinton, and by solid margins. But the difference is there was a drop,” said Matthew Isbell, a Florida political data consultant known for his MCI Maps.
“That 5% matters when it’s happening in other districts as well, most likely that are heavy Puerto Rican,” Isbell told the Washington Examiner. “Just by shaving off those points with better engagement and with better turnout, which is a reflection of the ground game the Republicans had, it adds up.”
Florida political experts and local politicians said the Republican ground game was more effective in an area that Democrats thought was a lock.
University of South Florida political science professor Susan MacManus, an expert on Florida politics, said that after an influx of Puerto Ricans into Florida after the hurricane, “the presumption was that they would be more engaged this election cycle and that they would heavily, heavily, heavily lean Democrat.”
But Trump’s and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s message to keep the economy open resonated with them.
“They were economic voters,” MacManus told the Washington Examiner. “A lot of them were working in the tourism industries, all the theme parks shutting down, and the last thing they wanted was another shutdown.”
Janer said the Puerto Ricans who emigrated from the island to Florida do not have allegiances to a particular party.
Instead, many listened to evangelical Christian pastors, who told them to vote for Trump in many of the 600 churches in the county.
Alvarez said Democrats in the state will need to adjust to each Hispanic group’s needs if they want to prevent losing more Puerto Ricans to the Republican Party.
“The key is, they have to learn this lesson, the Democratic Party,” he said. “As Hispanics, we hold a big chunk of the vote.”
