Puerto Rico, You Lovely Island
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That is not the part of the song that Obama’s campaign staffers will be singing today. They will probably prefer the second verse. Results are slow to come in, but obviously if the exit polls are even within 10 points of the actual vote tally Clinton has won one of her largest victories of the year. Exit polls indicate that it may be a 70-30 blowout. Depending on turnout, Clinton may net several hundred thousand votes. Fortunately, Puerto Rico is one of the contests that actually won’t be relevant in the fall, which is good news for Obama, since the exit polling says that only 52% of primary voters would back him in the fall if they were voting. Most of the rest say they would vote for McCain (18%) or not vote (22%). 50% said that they would be dissatisfied if Obama won the nomination.
Interestingly, Obama did the best (40%) among those who are more likely to identify as Puerto Rican rather than American, those who belong to the PPD, the Popular Democratic Party (51%), and therefore naturally also those who believe that Puerto Rico should be a commonwealth rather than a state (51%). The New York connection seems to have given an added boost to Clinton in a place where she was probably already going to do quite well, but she did almost as well with those who have no relatives in New York (62%) as she did with those who did (72%). It can’t hurt that Puerto Rican Democratic voters continue to have a very favourable view of Bill Clinton (82% fav/15% unfav).
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3 Responses to “Puerto Rico, You Lovely Island”
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And now we can add Puerto Rico to the list of states Obama is highly unlikely to carry in November.
Yeah, you know how those partisan primaries are important for determining who wins the state in a general election. I mean, did you see the way McCain shellacked Bush in New Hampshire in 2000? 48% to 30%? No way could Bush carry New Hampshire in the general.
Oh, wait.
Well, Puerto Rico is a weird, insular little place, whose parochial concerns don’t translate at all into US domestic politics. The only sizeable block of Puerto Rican voters in the US are in New York, a state that Obama couln’t lose if he tried. I’m sure the Obama camp is much more concerned with the shellacking they received among Hispanics in CA, TX, etc.