When my husband and I visited Puerto Rico in late February nearly everyone we spoke to wanted to talk about the island’s potentially pivotal role in determining the next Democratic nominee for President. Puerto Rico’s primary will be held this Sunday, and according to news reports from the island, the excitement has only mounted since we were there.

At the time of our visit the vote was scheduled to be held as a caucus, but back in March, as it became clear just how critical votes from Puerto Rican Democrats may turn out to be in the final delagate count, Roberto Prats, Puerto Rico’s Democratic chairman, decided to spend the extra funds to hold a primary.

There are eight superdelegates and 55 delegates at stake in Puerto Rico. Though many supporters of Senator Barack Obama contend he has enough delegates to win the nomination without Puerto Rico, he played it safe, arriving on the island last weekend on the heels of surrogates that included his wife and Gov. Bill Richardson. Senator Hillary Clinton arrived last Saturday, following on the momentum created by many visits to the island by her husband, President Bill Clinton, and by their daughter, Chelsea, who has become very popular with Puerto Ricans over the past few months, according to news accounts.

It’s an interesting situation given the unusual voting status of Puerto Ricans living in the U.S. territory, or Estado Libre Asociado (freely associated state) as Puerto Rico is often described in government agency documents when those documents are in Spanish. In official U.S. government documents, when those documents are in English, the island is referred to as a “Commonwealth,” but unlike citizens of the Commonwealths of Pennsylvania or Virginia, Puerto Ricans who happen to live on the island, U.S. citizens all, cannot vote in the general election for the President who will represent them.

Puerto Rican voters living on the island select Democratic and Republican presidential nominees every four years, traditionally by caucus. This year’s Republican caucus, held in February, drew fewer than 1,000 voters to caucus sites. Many of the people we talked to while we were on the island in February were not even aware that there was a Puerto Rican Republican Caucus or that they might have any role in any given election year in deciding who the Republican nominee for President might be. Clearly, the GOP hasn’t put much effort into reaching out to Puerto Ricans living on the island.

Puerto Ricans living on the island elect a non-voting representative to the U.S. House of Representatives, but they have no other elected representation in the U.S. government.

All this changes when a Puerto Rican moves to any state. Theoretically, a Puerto Rican citizen can move from San Juan to New York and the very next day register and vote for President or a voting member of Congress. If Puerto Rico were a state it would likely have at least eight representatives to the House of Representatives and two Senators.

Puerto Ricans living on the island elect their own legislative body, but they do not have a voting member of Congress to represent their interests in any number of federal governmental programs and policies that affect their daily lives. For example, there are more Puerto Ricans from the island fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan than the total number of military personnel serving in those conflicts from many more populous states.

Puerto Rico also elects a governor and when my husband and I were there this winter many people we talked to were proud to point out that the immediate past governor, Sila María Calderón, was a woman. Almost everyone we met said they were supporting Clinton, in part because Puerto Ricans were progressive enough to understand that a woman could run a government as well as a man. There was a sense that it was time to see how a woman might run things differently. To many, Calderón’s governorship was proof that Puerto Ricans do not hold to the traditional machismo attitudes they think mainlanders attribute to them. In almost the same breath, however, many Puerto Ricans told us they were supporting Hillary because it would take a woman and a mother to get the U.S. out of Iraq.

Though Clinton was the choice of nearly all the Puerto Ricans we talked to, they were quick to point out that both candidates were well qualified and that either would make a good president. Some were leaning toward Clinton, but said they planned to learn more about Obama in time for the vote and recent news reports show Obama gaining on Clinton among Puerto Rican voters. Everyone we met had such a sense of pride and excitement about their ability to affect the race. They cannot vote for or against Sen. John McCain in the general election, but they understood that deciding who he would face was a significant step in Puerto Rico’s post-1898 history.

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Posted Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
Filed under Politics Tagged as Barack-Obama, Democratic-primary, Hillary-Clinton, Latino, puerto-rico-primary | Trackback | RSS Comments