Puerto Ricans who fled to Florida after Hurricane Maria are not registering to vote

Nestor Serrano stands on the upstairs floor of his home in Yabucoa, Puerto Rico, where the walls were blown off by Hurricane Maria, last September.

THE BIG IDEA: Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico last September and prompted a mass exodus of more than 100,000 residents to the mainland United States. The Category 4 storm destroyed much of the island’s infrastructure, which was already decaying and crumbling amidst a financial crisis and a bankrupt territorial government. The exact number is still not known, but tens of thousands of people permanently resettled in Florida.

Frustration with Donald Trump’s lackadaisical and even antagonistic response – he vilified the mayor of San Juan and threatened to cut off funding for Puerto Rico at one point – prompted even some Republicans to warn that the episode could doom his presidency. After all, George W. Bush’s numbers never really recovered after Hurricane Katrina.

Because they’re already U.S. citizens, Puerto Ricans are eligible to vote as soon as they move to the mainland. The thinking last fall was that they’d be so angry at Trump that they’d be chomping at the bit to vote against Republicans in the midterms. Operatives from both parties said that this could prove decisive in a perennial battleground like Florida where elections are always close.

Once again, the conventional wisdom turns out to have been wrong.Trump appears to be defying the old rules of politics. In this case, it’s because most of the Puerto Ricans who have come to Florida are not registering to vote or otherwise getting involved in politics. At least for now.

Soraya Marquez of Mi Familia Vota walks around an overwhelmingly Puerto Rican neighborhood in Kissimmee, Fla., in July 2015 to register voters. 

– The freshest data reveals that there has been no surge in new Puerto Rican voters. During the nine months prior to the hurricane – January through September of 2017 – there were 343,000 people who registered to vote in Florida, and 18 percent were Hispanic, according to Daniel Smith, the chairman of the political science department at the University of Florida. During the nine months after the hurricane – from last October through the end of June – there were 326,000 new registered voters. Just 21 percent were Hispanic. That’s a pretty small uptick – and not necessarily explained by Puerto Rican registration at all.

The Puerto Ricans emigres have mostly gravitated toward the Orlando area, mainly because so many other Puerto Ricans already lived there. The number of people of Puerto Rican origin living in Florida surpassed 1 million in 2015, which is more than double what it was in 2000. The sprawling settlement of expats outside Orlando is in the heart of the Interstate 4 corridor, which bisects Florida. This swingiest region of the swingiest state in America has determined the outcome of multiple presidential elections.

But in the two Orlando-area counties with the highest concentration of Puerto Ricans, there has not been any meaningful increase in Democratic registration. In fact, because inactive voters are removed from the rolls, there are 12,315 fewer registered voters in Orange County today than on Election Day in 2016. In Osceola County, there are 3,400 more Democrats, 800 more Republicans and 9,200 more independents than for the last election. For context, there are more than 200,000 registered voters in Osceola.

Steve Schale, a Tallahassee-based Democratic strategist who directed Barack Obama’s 2008 victory in Florida and was a senior adviser on his 2012 reelection campaign, has been closely tracking these numbers in Excel spreadsheets, which he shared on Thursday.

“The concern I’ve had for a while is that … the Maria impact was probably not going to be as significant as people initially thought,” he said. “We’ve got two-and-a-half months left for voter registration. But these numbers show it’s not going to happen organically. … This is a warning flare that there’s real work to be done. … Dems need to be registering around the clock, which they clearly aren’t doing.”

He’s not alone. Many of the savviest Democrats in Florida are growing anxious that a blue wave might sweep across America in November but bypass their state. Outgoing Gov. Rick Scott (R) is challenging Sen. Bill Nelson (D) in what will surely be one of 2018’s most expensive contests. Republicans and Democrats both have competitive primaries on Aug. 28 to pick their nominees for the open governor’s race, which will likely remain a toss-up until the end.

People line up in San Juan to escape Puerto Rico last September after Hurricane Maria hit. They were boarding a Royal Caribbean relief boat that was sailing to Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.

– State Rep. Amy Mercado (D), who is of Puerto Rican descent and represents Orlando, said that many of the folks who came last fall have been struggling to find affordable housing and jobs. “Their main focus obviously is going to be survival,” she said. “They have to contend with trying to figure out their day-to-day lives. So, honestly, the last thing they’re thinking about is politics.”

Mercado praised groups like Vamos4PRAction for trying to educate the new arrivals about how the system works on the mainland. She said Puerto Rico’s elections are very different than Florida’s. “They don’t understand that there’s a soil and water board, let alone why it’s important,” she said. “They don’t always realize that the local issues affect them first, before the national issues.”

– Another factor is that Florida Republicans have not taken Puerto Ricans for granted. Mindful of the potential political impact of these new arrivals, Gov. Scott has courted the community aggressively and is already flooding Spanish-language media with ads. (Sen. Nelson is also running ads talking about his work to help Puerto Rico.) The LIBRE Institute, which is part of the constellation of political groups funded by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch, has been offering free “Welcome to Florida” classes to teach newly-arrived Puerto Ricans how to speak English and search for jobs — with some lessons about the virtues of free markets thrown in. The RNC also hired three staffers to reach out to the displaced people.

– Unrelated to the storm, Puerto Ricans on the mainland have long been less politically engaged than other part of the Hispanic diaspora. In 2016, 70 percent of eligible registered voters cast ballots in Florida. Research from Smith at the University of Florida shows that the turnout rate among Puerto Rican-born registered voters was only 62 percent. That was considerably less than the turnout rates among registered voters who immigrated to the U.S. from Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia and Mexico.

Smith believes “it is fanciful” at this point to think the influx of Puerto Ricans could tip the fall elections to Democrats. He noted that the political fallout of the hurricane is smaller than the fallout from the shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla., which has inspired a push to register new millennial voters. “And I’m skeptical of that to begin with,” Smith said of the so-called Parkland Effect.

President Trump shakes hands with Ricardo Rossello, governor of Puerto Rico, during a meeting in the Oval Office last October to discuss Hurricane Maria relief. 

– Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló flew to Orlando in April to unveil a new initiative called Poder to encourage displaced Puerto Ricans to register to vote and participate in Florida’s elections. The hope is that, if they do, this could help the island get more resources to recover from the hurricane and, in the governor’s dream scenario, statehood. “We’re trying to get Puerto Ricans on the mainland to get out the vote because that’s really the way we can make changes on these critical issues,” he said.

Rosselló lamented in an interview that “upwards of 90 percent” of adults who live on the island are registered to vote there, but it’s so low in the states. “So what we’re trying to do is make sure that we identify those in the community that haven’t registered,” he said. “We have a digital platform that can enable that. We’ve been doing both digital and grass-roots work on that front to get those numbers up.”

The 39-year-old governor, an MIT-trained scientist and the son of a former governor, said he is “still hopeful” that they can move the needle before the registration deadline on Oct. 5. “If you see the margin of victory in Florida in the major races over the last decade, you could see that 200,000 Puerto Ricans can certainly swing that outcome one way or the other,” he said.

– There’s no denying that successful voter registration drives could mean the difference between winning and losing. One percentage point separated the winners from the losers in the Sunshine State for each of the past two presidential and gubernatorial contests. In 2008, the Obama campaign oversaw efforts to add nearly 250,000 new voters to the rolls. Obama carried the state by about 230,000 votes. In 2012, he beat Mitt Romney by about 70,000 votes. “Had we not done the work that we did in both 2008 and 2012 on registration, we probably wouldn’t have won Florida in ’12,” said Schale. “I’m fairly certain that, in those 70,000 votes, you can find the people we registered over the preceding two cycles.” Trump carried Florida by 112,000 votes – out of 9.4 million ballots cast – two years ago.