Florida Gov. Rick Scott is smart to make “Puerto Rico the centerpiece of his campaign” for U.S. Senate. The Sunshine State is known for its photo-finish political campaigns, and it presents a real problem for the governor that approximately 40,000 Puerto Ricans resettled there in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. More than that, there are now more Puerto Ricans living in Florida (1.3 million) than there are Cuban-Americans, and they’re mostly Democratic-leaning voters who are extremely pissed off about how the Trump administration has handled the natural catastrophe on their home island. If Scott doesn’t show he’s different from the president, he could doom his prospects for victory.
He could be screwed anyway. Puerto Ricans are full American citizens who can immediately register to vote once they establish residency in any of the fifty states. Al Gore, who “lost” the state and the presidency by 537 votes could have benefitted from 40,000 angry and displaced voters bent on punishing his opponent’s political party. Gov. Scott knows he cannot afford to let those votes go unchallenged.
When [Scott] announced his bid in April, he spoke alongside top Puerto Rican official Luis Rivera Marín and touted efforts to help the island after the hurricane. The governor has visited the island six times since September and announced he backs the island’s bid for statehood.
“This state showed up and we helped Puerto Ricans that came here because the problems that happened after Maria and we showed up in Puerto Rico,” Scott said in April. “We’re going to continue to be the best friend in the world for Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico and in the United States.”
Shortly after his announcement, Scott went up with a $1 million Spanish-language TV spot. His efforts appear to have helped his standing with Puerto Ricans who moved to Florida before and after Maria, according to a recent Florida International University (FIU) poll.
Incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson cannot take these votes for granted. He very well may need to run up his margins with this voting group in order to prevail.
Unfortunately, there’s another thing Senator Nelson cannot ignore. As I wrote about recently, there is new research from Harvard political scientist Ryan Enos, whose recent book “The Space Between Us” looks at how white communities react to an influx of non-white immigrants. His work shows that white liberal tolerance for racial integration diminishes very quickly when faced with actual integration. Tolerance is highest where integration is already high or where it hardly exists at all.
The relationship between the proportion of an out-group in an area and group-based bias is curvilinear: it becomes greater as the out-group proportion increases until reaching a tipping point and then starting to decrease. This means that when a group makes up a large portion of a place — for concreteness, say 40 percent — each additional person above 40 percent actually decreases group-based bias.
That gobbledegook means that if there are suddenly a lot of Puerto Ricans living in areas that were previously all-white, even the liberals will get disconcerted for a time. This is the precise kind of phenomenon that Trump is willing and able to expertly exploit. It’s unlikely that Rick Scott won’t try to exploit it for his own benefit, although he’ll have to do a careful dance to make sure it all doesn’t cancel out or actually work to his disadvantage.
If Scott panders to nativists, then Nelson has to make sure that the Puerto Rican community is aware of it. Aside from that, he needs to tie Scott to Trump and point out that if he is elected he will go to Washington DC and vote with the president ninety percent or more of the time. He may even prevent the Democrats from winning a majority and forcing Trump to address the needs of Puerto Rico.
I suspect this election will be one of the tightest in the country and there’s a good chance it will determine control of the Senate. For these reasons, I think people really ought to give it more prominence.
Nelson should run an ad showing that the Senate could have used oversight to force Trump not to screw Puerto Rico after the hurricane.
It would seem that just using that singular argument might well be sufficient to make the thought of a Senator Rick Scott anathema to any voter of Puerto Rican descent.
Plus, if they controlled appropriations in even one chamber, they could flood P.R. with money.
Been in Tampa for over a year now. Scott is a photo op gov. He has made at least 3 visits to PR. There are photos and film on the local news but I cannot tell you what the trips were about. He has helped the states hotel/motel business. The PRs have kept them full as tourism is down. However, Scott has done nothing to help these people find other housing.
Great insight, thanks Martin.
However I found this sentence extremely chilling and disturbing: “This is the precise kind of phenomenon that Trump is willing and able to expertly exploit.”
Because it is true: Trump is an expert racist and divider. It sickens me to the bottom of my soul.
And these hypocrites used to call President Obama a divider. I have no respect for them whatsoever. There is no arguing/debating with people who have checked out of reality. Time to fight fire with fire…long overdue.
I more chilled by the phenomenon than by Republicans exploiting it.
It is a symptom of fundamental societal problems that have tempered Liberal/Progressive governance for at least the last 30 years. Hell, it forced FDR to put Whites Only on the New Deal to get it passed.
My own state’s “liberal strongholds” have recently gone batshit over the Democratic-led city government’s proposed homelessness solutions that would put a few poors and browns in/near their neighborhoods…..including rejecting converting an old nursing home into a hospice for homeless people.
Virtually all republicans are dividers, it’s how thin have won elections for 40 years.
So of course they attacked Obama, they project what they do on their enemies.
It’s very much a variation of what Carl Rove was so good at….
Attack your opponent at his strength. That’s what they did with Obama.
Division and Projection is all they have.
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Rick Scott created the template for Trumpism–a fraudster/conman failed biznessman/CEO who cooked up a massive Medicare scam, and then (as an unscrupulous, unqualified “conservative” scoundrel) ran and attained the office of CEO of an anti-democratic gerrymandered state. In short, a political criminal.
And most Floridians found him just dandy. The failure of Florida’s citizenry when presented with a criminal Repub CEO turned out to be the canary in the coalmine for today’s National Trumpalists.
Obviously the reactionary white voters of FL will go apeshit when Der Trumper comes to town and whips them into a frenzy over the “Unfairness!” of “non-citizen!” Puerto Ricans seeking to vote for a US senator. This will indeed be the only “issue” that gets addressed in the campaign.
But one would have thought that if an anti-Trumper Blue Wave were actually going to arise, FL would be one of the states where that would happen and Skeletor Scott would be swept away as if caught in a riptide of Hurricane Irma. If political criminal Trumper can dampen the supposed wave simply by orchestrating fear-mongering and hatred against Puerto Ricans in FL–his specialty, after all–then there’s not going to be much of a wave….