Will Puerto Ricans turn out?

Lessons from Florida, with turnout rates of the more than 300k Puerto Rico-born voters in the 2020 and 2024 General Elections

The electoral fallout from the incendiary and racist remarks by Trump surrogate, Tony Hinchcliffe, at the Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday continues. Even Puerto Rico GOP Chair, Ángel Cintrón, has threatened to not vote for Donald Trump unless Trump repudiates Hinchcliffe’s comments.

Will registered Puerto Ricans in battleground states follow Cintrón, turning out en mass and voting against the former President? Yesterday, Washington Post journalist Philip Bump wrote that “Puerto Rican Americans are Americans whose legal votes might make the difference next week.”

Of course, it’s not the first time Trump has demeaned Puerto Ricans. But it’s one thing to be rightly offended by his campaign’s racist tropes; it’s another to turn out and vote against Trump.

Gauging Puerto Rican turnout in battleground states is difficult to do. Although roughly two-thirds of Latinos have supported the Democratic nominee for president in recent elections, exit polls, such as edison research’s 2020 NEP, typically do not break down Latino voters into subnational groups, as pollster Latino Decisions was quick to point out in 2016.

But I have original data that might help us understand what we might expect in battleground states. For more than a decade, I’ve painstakingly collected, cleaned, and processed publicly available data in Florida to record the birthplaces of registered voters. Much of the data I process starts off as slop, but I now have a database with the birthplaces of over 10 million registered voters in Florida, including over 300k registered voters who were born in Puerto Rico.

There are hundreds of thousands more Puerto Ricans born in the U.S. who are registered to vote in Florida, as well as other Puerto Rico-born registered voters for whom I cannot verify their place of birth. (Turns out, there are a lot of cities named San Juan spread across the globe). Some estimates place the number of voter-eligible Puerto Ricans in Florida approaching 900k.

The table below, generated from my data, shows the number of Puerto Rico-born registered voters in Florida. It is conservative, as it only includes registered voters who I’m confident were born in Puerto Rico and are currently registered in Florida.

Not surprisingly, very few Puerto Rico-born registered voters in Florida are Republicans, fewer than one-in-five. The plurality are NPAs (42%), with Democrats accounting for 36%.

Where do these Puerto Rico-born registered voters reside, and more importantly, do they turn out to vote?