Never Trumper Republican consultant Rick Wilson lays it out with brutal honesty:
Yes, you can argue that people like Wilson got us into this mess we find ourselves in, but that doesn’t make him wrong. In Donald Trump, Puerto Rican Americans have encountered their absolute worst enemy. His ugly neglect toward the victims of the terrible hurricane that struck the island in September 2017 has been a genuine outrage. Now, Trump follows this outrage with more lies, hatred, and insults, arguing, with shocking dishonesty, that Puerto Rico has received $91 billion in aid! Greg Sargent sees what’s going on. In his new column, Trump’s new Puerto Rico hate-tweets rest on a very ugly premise, he lays it out clearly:
President Trump wants Midwestern farmers to believe that Puerto Rico, with the complicity of Democrats, is trying to take their disaster relief money from them — and that the island is undeserving of any further financial help.
As usual, these arguments are based on lies. But as Trump’s lies go, these are particularly instructive — and ugly.
Yet these new lies also raise a question: Why does Trump assume that Midwestern farmers will believe them?…
Crucially, Trump also argued that Puerto Rico politicians “only take from USA” and that Democrats now “want to give them more, taking dollars away from our Farmers.”
Very ugly indeed. Trump is AGAIN using all-out appeals to bigotry to divide the American people. And he’s deliberately stirring up hatred against Puerto Ricans to do it.
Horrible.
So what are we going to do about it?
And what needs to be done?
We lost a Senate seat in Florida because we were outworked. From The Orlando Sentinel, 21 November 2018:
Ahead of the election, national and local Puerto Rican groups hosted registration drives, knocked on doors, launched ads and coordinated rallies throughout the state of Florida — all designed to get most of Florida’s 208,000 registered Puerto Rican-born voters to the polls.
But early numbers show that Puerto Ricans actually lagged other Hispanic groups in voting, and some groups are pointing to mainland politicians’ lack of investment in and understanding of Florida’s Puerto Rican community as a factor. [My emphasis]
“You can’t just rely on community groups. … the [Democratic] Party can’t just sit back and let the groups do it,” said Federico De Jesús, a Democratic consultant who was Hispanic communications director for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008.
The full picture of Puerto Rican turnout in the 2018 midterms won’t be known until more data is available. But Daniel Smith, a University of Florida professor who chairs the Department of Political Science, said the early figures show Puerto Rican turnout trailed other Hispanic groups.
Rick Scott, the vile criminal who just barely won the Senate race, made repeated, highly visible trips to Puerto Rico during the campaign. He understood. It was already obvious in the summer of 2018 that Scott was making inroads among Florida Puerto Ricans:
Gov. Rick Scott is better-known and better-liked than Sen. Bill Nelson among Puerto Ricans in Florida, according to a new poll that spells trouble for the incumbent as this Democratic-leaning group leans toward the Republican challenger ahead of the November election.
About 75 percent have a good opinion of Scott, while just 18 percent do not, according to the poll of 1,000 Puerto Ricans in the state commissioned by Florida International University.
Only 7 percent didn’t know enough about Scott to hazard an opinion of him — a sign the governor’s seven trips to Puerto Rico and his aggressive campaigning welcoming evacuees from the island after Hurricane Maria have paid dividends.
Nelson’s numbers: 62 percent favor him, 26 percent don’t and 13 percent don’t know enough to voice an opinion, the poll shows.
Florida is absolutely CRUCIAL in 2020. Just as so many of you, I am utterly determined to take it from Trump. Andrew Gillum gets it. He knows we have to think BIG, register huge numbers of new Democratic voters. But we’re going to have to work really hard to increase enthusiasm among Puerto Rican voters, and the effort needs to start NOW.
Oh, and Rick Scott, the Medicare fraudster whose company scammed the system for $1.7 billion, who took the Fifth 75 times when questioned about it? He’s heading up Trump’s “healthcare” task force.
Elections matter. Florida matters. Puerto Rican voters matter.
GOTV, GOTV, GET OUT THE DAMNED VOTE!