Will Puerto Ricans push Obama over the top?
The enormous migrant community of Osceola County, Florida could deliver the president a key battleground victory
BY HAROLD MEYERSON, THE AMERICAN PROSPECT
If you want to know what’s different about Florida, both in general and in this election cycle, just ask José López. The organizer and leader of a laundry workers’ union that’s part of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), López has been walking precincts as part of SEIU’s campaign to re-elect President Obama since mid-summer. One day, as he was chatting with an elderly man on his doorstep, his canvassing partner interrupted and asked López, “How much do you know about snakes?” A rather large snake, it seems, had slithered between López’s legs.
The elderly gentleman, who, like hundreds of thousands of new Florida voters, had migrated from Puerto Rico to the Orlando metropolitan area, excused himself, returned carrying a machete and proceeded to hack the snake not entirely to death. “The machete was too dull,” says López, shaking his head. “He ended up just beating that poor snake to death with that thing.”
“Old Puerto Ricans,” López sighs. He’s a Cuban-American himself, born and raised in New York’s Washington Heights, but he’s followed the geographic and political trajectory of New York’s very liberal Puerto Rican (or Nuyorican, as it’s come to be called) community, which has seen tens of thousands of its members move to the fast-growing I-4 corridor in central Florida over the past decade. Add these migrants from the North to the migrants from the South, and you have the reason why President Obama won Florida in 2008, and might just win it again this November.
Florida has long been a political anomaly: the one state where Latinos voted Republican. For decades, the state’s Latino population consisted chiefly of Cubans, who, like most refugees from Communist nations, tended toward conservatism. As recently as 20 years ago, about 80 percent of the state’s Latinos were Cuban. Today just 30 percent are—the rest are chiefly Puerto Rican, along with others from South America and Mexico. The diminished political weight of the Cuban community, one leading Florida Democrat points out, was evident in Monday’s presidential debate on foreign policy. “The debate was held in South Florida,” he says, “but it was the first presidential debate in decades with no question, no discussion, on Cuba.”
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http://www.salon.com/2012/10/26/will_puerto_ricans_push_obama_over_the_top/
