Puerto Ricans cannot vote in general elections despite being U.S. citizens, but they can exert a powerful influence with relatives on the mainland. Phones across the island of 3.2 million people were ringing minutes after the speaker derided the U.S. territory Sunday night, and they still buzzed Monday.

Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris is competing with Trump to win over Puerto Rican communities in Pennsylvania and other swing states. Shortly after stand-up comic Tony Hinchcliffe said that, “I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico,” Puerto Rican reggaeton superstar Bad Bunny announced he was backing Harris.

After Sunday’s rally, a senior adviser for the Trump campain, Danielle Alvarez, said in a statement that Hinchcliffe’s joke did “not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”

  • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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    6 hours ago

    I think the cluste4fuck that was the aftermath of the earthquake in Puerto Rico was a unifying moment for America.

    Trump’s supporters and haters all agreed that the President of Puerto Rico was a useless, arrogant, son of a bitch.

  • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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    9 hours ago

    Reminder: The only reason Puerto Ricans cannot vote is because Republicans refuse to recognize it as a state, and they do that because they don’t want brown people to vote, and they don’t want brown people to vote because they don’t want them to exist.

    • VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      As much as I hate the GOP, Puerto Rico has never attempted to apply for statehood. Their referendums on the subject have never shown a large enough amount of support for them to try a real vote. They’re typically around a 50-50 split.

      • smeenz@lemmy.nz
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        7 hours ago

        What are the main reasons they have for not voting in favour of statehood?

      • Crozekiel@lemmy.zip
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        8 hours ago

        State or not I think its pretty ridiculous that they are american citizens but can’t vote for president of the united states… People living in DC get to vote and aren’t living in a state.

        • skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de
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          5 hours ago

          But they choose to not. One of those cake and eat it too scenarios.

          A territory like them is eligible for Federal money from various programs, while not having to pay Federal income tax. If they became a state, they’d then have to pay income tax, lose benefit of the free program money, but be allowed to vote.

          If you don’t want to fully commit to the whole package and are milking the advantages of being a territory, should you really get a right to choose how the package that is being taxed and giving you free money is steered?

          (Oversimplification, of course.)

          If I were a member of a territory, I don’t really know where my thoughts would land.

          However, as one that is taxed, it seems that allowing the untaxed to choose our taxed destiny would be disingenuous.

        • mitchty@lemmy.sdf.org
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          8 hours ago

          Only citizens residing in a state for the majority of the year can vote for federal elections. Basically you need a senator to vote federally. Hawaii and all other states were the same way when they too were territories. All PR needs to do is vote for statehood and then I guess the political shitshow starts as well as flag redesign.

  • kent_eh@lemmy.ca
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    9 hours ago

    After Sunday’s rally, a senior adviser for the Trump campain, Danielle Alvarez, said in a statement that Hinchcliffe’s joke did “not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”

    Your team knew exactly who he is and you specifically invited him to be part of your event.

    • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
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      5 hours ago

      The Trump team also asked him to remove the word C*** from his set before he went on and he agreed.

      The Trump team reviewed his set before he went on and did not have issues with Puerto Rico comments.

  • Raiderkev@lemmy.world
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    9 hours ago

    I’m wondering what Kimberly Guilfoyle - Don Jrs half Puerto Rican girlfriend thinks about it. I’m sure she’s doing mental gymnastics to justify it.

    • smeenz@lemmy.nz
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      7 hours ago

      To be in a relationship with Donny-lite, you would have to be a pretty awful person to begin with. I expect she hates brown people just as much as he does.

  • Phoenicianpirate@lemm.ee
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    9 hours ago

    I saw a video of the ‘comedy’ that was said about Puerto Rico and I am honestly just fucking baffled as to why they hate them that much? I guess all they need to be to be hated is just be browner than they are.

    Also how come the issue of Trump’s disgusting behavior during Hurricane Maria and his refusal to fully help them beyond a stupid stunt that had him throw a paper towel at someone’s face.

      • unphazed@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        The GOP controllers aren’t the racists though. They’re rich, and puppets to the wealthy. In order to remain in positions of power, they create an enemy, in the form of bigotry and racism. Their sheep are racists. This is why though I trust very few politicians, I trust the Dems more atm because they are not using hatred and violence.

        • ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml
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          5 hours ago

          I’m not so sure, I bet some (or most?) of them are racist too. I’m sure they play it up, but do you really think they are all that accepting of people of color?

          • unphazed@lemmy.world
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            1 hour ago

            I think they are accepting of themselves and only thmselves so long as their selfishness is to benefit. For sure though, the act of leading people with racist rhetoric is as bad or even worse than racism itself.

    • Grilipper54@sh.itjust.works
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      8 hours ago

      I was thinking the guy is an idiot and meant to say Cuba but I have no idea. This is the first time I’ve ever heard anybody talk crap about Puerto Rico and it made no sense.

      • smeenz@lemmy.nz
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        7 hours ago

        I assumed he meant to say Haiti, which is still awful, but at least it would have kind of made sense…poorly.

      • mitchty@lemmy.sdf.org
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        8 hours ago

        Man when I went to pr for a quick vacation the amount of people asking about passports floored me. I was like it’s a us territory how have you not learnt that in school?

        Also I got lots of local pr Spanish slang, they’re chill peeps and mofongo is the best. I think they should get statehood they’re bigger in population than the state I grew up in and it would be nice to shake up us politics with more senate seats.

  • atempuser23@lemmy.world
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    9 hours ago

    No. This is NOT shaping the race. VOTE

    This changes nothing not a single Trump voter changed their minds. The Trump Puerto Ricans agree with this. They just think it’s the ‘others’ fault.

    VOTE

    • frezik@midwest.social
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      9 hours ago

      Generally yes, but not in Puerto Rico. If they move to the mainland, they can vote for any elections there, but while living in Puerto Rico, they only vote for members of Congress that serve a mostly observational role.

        • CptEnder@lemmy.world
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          8 hours ago

          Unrelated but wow this is strange because I’m a New Yorker who’s lived in PR and moving to France haha.

          What the other comment said is accurate though, I could vote absentee in both places, but lose that right in PR if I change my residence - lot of ppl do this for taxes. Afaik I could permanently vote in France as long as I have my US citizenship. Kinda messed up tbh.

          But I swear if THIS is the thing that sends Trump’s campaign off the rails hahahaha. I fucking love Puerto Rico and the irony they’d sway as Presidential election is poetic.

    • ABluManOnLemmy@feddit.nl
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      9 hours ago

      Yes, they have a right to vote in the state they last lived in (or, if they never lived in one, perhaps the state their parent last lived in?) but unfortunately Puerto Ricans can’t vote in presidential elections.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    After Sunday’s rally, a senior adviser for the Trump campain, Danielle Alvarez, said in a statement that Hinchcliffe’s joke did “not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”

    “All the stuff about you people being vermin that poison the blood of America, though, we meant that.”

    • frezik@midwest.social
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      10 hours ago

      What an incredibly stupid thing for them to say. This was an official election rally, and they 100% vetted every joke before he went out there. If they didn’t, they’re incompetent. So either way, their own weak ass defense is damning.

  • RatzChatsubo@lemm.ee
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    17 hours ago

    People need to lighten up. I heard his full set and it was hilarious and very young in cheak

    • pyre@lemmy.world
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      9 hours ago

      the nation that started as a rebellion on this is doing the same thing to its own citizens? that’s like building the land of the free using slave labor!

  • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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    21 hours ago

    I can just hear those MAGA morons smugly chuckling, “What can they do LOL they can’t even vote, fuck 'em!”

    No, fuck you.

    • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
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      9 hours ago

      Puerto Rico periodically votes on whether or not to pursue becoming a state, becoming a state doesn’t win except in one vote that was specifically a non-binding vote on the topic and that had much lower turnout than other votes on the idea.

      DC was literally created specifically to not be a state, so that no state held the seat of the federal government.

      • frezik@midwest.social
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        10 hours ago

        They reached a majority vote in favor of statehood in the 2020 referendum. We’re waiting on Congress. There’s supposed to be another vote in this general election.

        Make them a state, or give them independence. The will of the people of Puerto Rico should decide, but the current status is untenable.

        • pyre@lemmy.world
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          9 hours ago

          they should be a state. if they become independent the US will fuck them over forever.

          • frezik@midwest.social
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            9 hours ago

            Well, they’d be thrown in with the rest of islands of the Caribbean on that one. That’s something that should change regardless.

    • Canadian_anarchist@lemmy.ca
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      21 hours ago

      What happened “no taxation without representation” that the colonists fought for in the war of independence? Apparently it only applies to white people.

      • djsoren19@yiffit.net
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        10 hours ago

        It was a lie from the start, it only ever applied to a few wealthy old white men who didn’t want any cuts to their profit margins after the British fought a costly war to defend them from French and Native retaliation.

        • Verat@sh.itjust.works
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          20 hours ago

          While they dont pay income taxes to the IRS, they do pay customs taxes, federal commodity taxes, and federal payroll taxes (Social Security, Medicare, and Unemployment) to the IRS, which sounds alot like federal taxes to me.

          • raef@lemmy.world
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            15 hours ago

            It also feels like it’s something different because they aren’t supposed to go into the general fund, but advance payment for specific benefits

            • irotsoma@lemmy.world
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              11 hours ago

              But they don’t have a say in how the money is spent or whether the tax should exist. So it’s still the same issue whether it’s for a specific purpose or whether or not they benefit from it. It’s the freedom of choice that they still don’t have.

              • raef@lemmy.world
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                10 hours ago

                There is an attempt to conform to the taxation/representation issue, but it’s never going to be 100%. Non-citizens and foreign entities are going to be subject to certain taxes within the US as well. At a simple level, there’s no way avoid sales taxes. People have to pay sales tax in states they can’t vote in either

                • irotsoma@lemmy.world
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                  8 hours ago

                  Sales tax is different. That pays for the infrastructure to get the goods to market, theoretically. Though admittedly that is not exactly true everywhere, the general idea of sales tax is for economic reasons, not residential.

                  And of course it’s not going to be 100%, but we’re talking about large portions of the population that were purposely excluded, e.g. women, slaves, etc., in the past, and currently lots of people of all genders and races who live in Puerto Rico, Guam, D.C, etc…

                  PR alone accounts for over 3 million adults, or about 1% of the US population, with little to no representation, most of them citizens. Wyoming only has about 580,000 people, or about 0.17% of the population, but controls 2% of the Senate, 0.23% of the house, and 0.56% of the presidential election.

      • frezik@midwest.social
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        10 hours ago

        It doesn’t, and the reasons for being that way are long in the past. The originally US wanted to avoid any state having the capitol at a time when states were more independent entities than they are now. People weren’t really meant to live there at all. Politicians and there staff would travel in from the surrounding areas. Of course, it’s evolved way past that, and the citizens of DC deserve the full representation of statehood.

      • dutchkimble@lemy.lol
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        21 hours ago

        Got it, so North Carokota, South Dakolina, and DC and Puerto Rico. I think it’s a great idea.

      • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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        21 hours ago

        I was gonna say it’s ridiculous to make DC a state, it’s just a city!

        Turns out more people live in DC than Wyoming or Vermont LOL. So I’m down!

        Also I’ve heard that monkey’s brains, although popular in Cantonese cuisine, are not often found there.

        • frezik@midwest.social
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          10 hours ago

          But it doesn’t have an airport. Or a car dealership. There’s a car dealership a few blocks from the Capitol building, but it doesn’t have one.

          (This was an actual argument from the GOP on the floor of Congress.)

          • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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            5 hours ago

            “The Constitution doesn’t say a state has to have an airport or a car dealership.”

            “WeLL It ShOuLd! We DoN’t WaNt sHiThOlE sTaTeS!!1!!”

        • KmlSlmk64@lemmy.world
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          16 hours ago

          IIRC if DC became a state, only specific federal buildings, such as the white house, scotus & the capitol buildings would remain as a territory (due to the constitution), but, because of a amendment to the us constitution giving DC the same amount of voters _(members of the electoral college)_for the president as the lowest-representation (essentially always 3), which only citizens living inside the area would be allowed to vote for, only the citizens of white house would be able to vote for 3 whole electors.

          I might be incirrect, as I am not a US citizen, but I’ve seen this mentioned somewhere long ago

          • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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            5 hours ago

            If DC were converted to a state, presumably this would be changed so there would be no district. The federal buildings would just be buildings in that state.

        • dh34d@lemmynsfw.com
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          13 hours ago

          As a GA resident right across the river from SC, I understand that sentiment. SC sucks. Those bastards stole our city name and our fuckin baseball team.

        • myusernameis@lemmy.ca
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          21 hours ago

          If we combined Montana, Nebraska, Wyoming, and both Dakotas into one mega state, they’d have about the population of South Carolina.

          But somehow they get 17 electoral votes to SCs 9 and 10 senators to California’s 2.

          So I vote for Monomskakota!

        • horse_battery_staple@lemmy.world
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          21 hours ago

          But think about all the food down there in SC, y’all can claim it. Maybe they’ll take some of the empathy and intersectional community minded mutual aid networks y’all got and we can all be a little fatter and happier.

          Plus, we all get more papusas and salpicon!

  • InverseParallax@lemmy.world
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    23 hours ago

    https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-0065

    There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.

    The electoral college was purely designed to let southerners use their slaves for votes. Letting Puerto Ricans vote doesn’t help Southerners cheat.

  • FelixCress@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Puerto Ricans cannot vote in general elections despite being U.S. citizens

    So, is anyone still under an ilusion that the US is a democracy?

            • AmidFuror@fedia.io
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              9 hours ago

              Sure, it’s a form of government run by the people through various means which could include electing representatives to govern them. They could also directly vote for every law or policy. The people could include all people of the land or only citizens, only adults, only men, non-slaves, non-felons, etc. There have been many forms of democratic governments in our history.

    • dcpDarkMatter@kbin.earth
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      24 hours ago

      This is the case for all American territories. A statehood referendum has been put up multiple times throughout the years and there’s never been a really definitive result.

      • bamfic@lemmy.world
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        22 hours ago

        Some people there want independence, others want statehood, I was told. No consensus either way.

  • Cruxifux@feddit.nl
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    1 day ago

    I’ve never understood the whole Puerto Rico situation. Your country was built on the rage of having taxation without representation. Why is it that Puerto Rico isn’t allowed to participate in your elections despite being US citizens?

      • Verat@sh.itjust.works
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        20 hours ago

        While they dont pay income taxes to the IRS, they do pay customs taxes, federal commodity taxes, and federal payroll taxes (Social Security, Medicare, and Unemployment) to the IRS, which sounds alot like federal taxes to me.

        • raef@lemmy.world
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          15 hours ago

          It also feels like it’s something different because they aren’t supposed to go into the general fund, but advance payment for specific benefits

    • mkwt@lemmy.world
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      23 hours ago

      It’s really racism. But if you want the legalistic explanation, here it is…

      The United States started out with 13 states that were all ex-British territories on the Eastern seaboard of North America. There are now 50 states. Every state after the first 13 got its statehood by first being a territory, adopting a state Constitution at a constitutional convention, and then getting that Constitution approved by US Congress, and so being “admitted to the Union.”

      Under the Constitution, only states (and Washington DC) participate in the electoral college. The concept of non-state “territory” did not necessarily exist when that part was written, because there were only the original 13, and the Louisiana purchase wasn’t done until later.

      [Washington DC is a very special “district” that is not a state and not a territory.]

      Puerto Rico has stayed at the territory stage since it was acquired in the Spanish-American war (started 1898). Why? Well, mostly racism. There have also been some popular votes in Puerto Rico, with very mixed results. In the currently evenly split political climate, getting any new state admitted is probably impossible (as it was before the civil war).

      There’s also some undercurrent that maybe the US is kinda uncomfortable holding on to these overseas islands (which are mostly connected to the same Spanish-American war). Philippines became an independent country. On the other hand, Hawaii got statehood in 1959 (but there was a whole racist history there of white colonization).

      • Cruxifux@feddit.nl
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        21 hours ago

        Yeah this is kind of the answer I was looking for. I didn’t really ask the question properly tho. Thanks.

    • this@sh.itjust.works
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      24 hours ago

      Because our system is broken af designed and manipulated by powerful rich rascists who don’t want to give up control.

    • catloaf@lemm.ee
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      1 day ago

      They don’t pay federal income tax (but they do pay other federal taxes, like payroll taxes including social security).