Mitt Romney won the Puerto Rico primary, the Associated Press tells us, with more than 50% of the vote and so will be awarded all 20 of its delegates to the Republican National Convention. “More than 50%” is a considerable understatement, as Dave Leip’s U.S. Election Atlas website tells us that, with 16% of precincts reporting, Romney is receiving 87% of the votes cast. I don’t know for sure that those are representative precincts, but I would bet a pretty large sum of money that they are. Romney has the support of Governor Luis Fortuño, who as Puerto Rico’s non-voting delegate to the House of Representatives (though official and misleading title is resident commissioner) caucused with Republicans. In island politics Fortuño is the leader of the New Progressive party (PNP is the Spanish acronym) and my hunch is that his Progresistas form the large majority of Republican primary voters and that they will want to register their support for the governor, who is up for reelection this year. Four years ago Puerto Rico was similarly near-unanimous, casting 90% of its caucus votes for John McCain (Romney was out of the race by the time that vote was taken). The turnout with 16% of precincts reporting is just over 20,000, which suggests a total turnout of 120,000, far less than the 384,000 who voted in the Democratic primary there in 2008, but about equal to the 121,000 votes Barack Obama received there. Puerto Ricans voting in New York and adjacent states have long been very heavily Democratic; the more recent Puerto Rican migrants to metro Orlando in crucial Florida seem more evenly divided. All these things considered, it’s somewhere between a robust and a pathetic turnout for Republicans.
One question remains. Why did Rick Santorum spend precious campaign time in Puerto Rico rather than Illinois? And why was he unprepared when he did so, to the point that he got into trouble by suggesting that if Puerto Rico becomes a state (as Fortuño and the PNP advocate) it would have to adopt English as its primary language. English is already one of Puerto Rico’s two official languages (the other of course being Spanish), but Puerto Ricans bristle at the thought that they would have to give up their everyday use of Spanish if the island became a state. After all, nearly half of New Mexicans used Spanish in their everyday life when New Mexico became a state in 1912. And anyone familiar with Puerto Rico politics could have told Santorum that island voters tend toward unanimity in these things and that his chances of winning delegates by holding Romney below 50% were negligible.
