As South Florida news outlets highlight, President Obama’s visit to Puerto Rico Tuesday is all about reaching out to potential voters in Florida’s growing boricua community.
The President’s Task Force on Puerto Rico reported in 2009 (pdf.) that President Obama “added to the Task Force’s responsibilities by seeking advice and recommendations on policies that promote job creation, education, health care, clean energy, and economic development on the Island.”
South Florida Sun-Sentinel political columnist Anthony Mann writes:
Florida, which will award 29 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency next year, is the biggest swing state in the country. Monday’s trip was the president’s third Florida visit this year.
Mann adds:
Residents of Puerto Rico, who are getting their first official presidential visit in 50 years, can’t vote in presidential elections. But more Puerto Ricans live in the mainland U.S. than on the island – and they’re a potentially important constituency, especially in the Sunshine State, where their population has exploded in Central Florida’s Interstate 4 corridor.
The Miami Herald reports that “the whirlwind visit to an island crippled by a soaring murder rate, mass exodus, and 16.2 percent unemployment has less to do with the island’s overwhelming problems and much more to do with Florida’s I-4 corridor.”
According to the Pew Hispanic Center, the 2010 U.S. Census counted 3.7 million Hispanics living in Puerto Rico and 4.6 million living in the U.S. The Center adds that “nearly one-third of Puerto Rican-origin Hispanics in the 50 states and D.C. were born in Puerto Rico.”
People born on the island or of Puerto Rican descent remain the second largest group of Hispanics living in the U.S. They can vote in federal elections if they live on the mainland and not on the island territory. The Pew Hispanic Center adds that in 2009 about 19 percent of Puerto Ricans (.pdf) lived in Florida.
The Pew Hispanic Center (pdf.) shows that in the 2008 presidential election, 67 percent of Hispanics voted for Obama, but his biggest breakthrough came in Florida, where he won 57 percent of the Latino vote in a state where Latinos have historically supported Republican presidential candidates. George W. Bush carried 56 percent of the Latino vote in Florida in 2004.
