Harris Vies For Latino Voters, Highlighting Trump Surrogate’s Disrespect Toward Puerto Rico at Madison Square Garden

In the final days of the campaign, both Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump’s camps have been attempting to appeal to Latino voters—a growing, key, and politically non-monolithic electorate.

What has been a consistent competition for these votes throughout the entirety of the 2024 election cycle intensified last week when Trump surrogate and stand-up comic Tony Hinchcliffe referred to Puerto Rico as “garbage” during his time slot at the Madison Square Garden MAGA rally on Sunday.

“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,” Hinchcliffe, who has said comedians should never apologize, began. “I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” During his 12-minute remarks, Hinchcliffe also said, “These Latinos, they love making babies, too, just know that. They do. They do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside, just like they did to our country.”

The pushback from Puerto Ricans across America was instantaneous. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, who first responded to the comments while on a Twitch stream with Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, said it was “super upsetting,” adding that her family is from Puerto Rico.

“The thing that is so messed up that I wish more people understood, is that the things that they do in Puerto Rico are a testing ground for the policies and the horrors that they wish … that they do unveil in working-class communities across the United States,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “When you have some a-hole calling Puerto Rico ‘floating garbage,’ know that that’s what they think about you.”

Celebrities with Puerto Rican heritage, including Jennifer Lopez and Bad Bunny, joined in, denouncing the remarks and expressing love for the islands—whose residents cannot vote in the presidential election despite being American citizens.

“You do know he’s a COMEDIAN, and these are JOKES, right????” the Trump campaign’s national press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote in an email to TIME magazine. “The joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign,” senior advisor Danielle Alvarez said in a statement, also to TIME.

“Nobody loves our Latino community and our Puerto Rican community more than I do,” Trump said at a rally in Allentown, a majority Latino town.

“Puerto Rico is home to some of the most talented, innovative, and ambitious people in our nation. And Puerto Ricans deserve a president who sees and invests in that strength,” Harris said in a video posted the same day as Trump’s MSG rally. “I will never forget what Donald Trump did and what he did not do when Puerto Rico needed a caring and a competent leader. He abandoned the island.”

When Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in 2017, a disaster that ended up killing thousands, Trump delayed aid and diverted funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to pay for his effort to return undocumented migrants to Mexico. According to a 2021 report by the Housing Department’s Office of the Inspector General, the Trump administration held up more than $20 billion in aid for Puerto Rico after Maria. (Also, the throwing of the paper towels.)

This week, the Harris campaign released a new Spanish-language ad, “Somos Más,” or “We are more,” addressing Hinchcliffe’s comments. “We’re not trash. We’re more,” the narrator says. “This November 5th, Trump will understand some people’s trash is others’ treasure.”

According to reporting from The Washington Post, the Harris campaign said it would spend a six-figure sum to air the ad in battleground states before Election Day.

The efforts to court this group of voters have been particularly important to the outcome in swing-state Pennsylvania, where around 579,000 eligible Latino voters could sway the election results. In 2016, Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 44,292 votes, while in the 2020 election, Biden took the Keystone State by 81,660 votes. Four years ago, 61% of “Hispanic” voters went for Biden, compared to 36% for Trump, according to Pew.

A recent dispatch from the New York Times based on interviews with more than three dozen Latino voters across eastern Pennsylvania found “voters who were both highly engaged and deeply divided.”

Victor Martinez owns several Spanish radio stations in eastern Pennsylvania and hosts El Relajo de la Mañana from Allentown. He told the Times that his audience had received more attention from Democrats than ever before, and that Hinchcliffe’s comments about Puerto Rico had mobilized listeners who previously “didn’t give a damn” to vote for Harris.

“There is a sense of pride — you insulted us, and we’re going to show you,” he said.

Democrats running across the country have been messaging to Latina voters and “they hope they can use the power of those Latina women to convince Latino men to support Democrats up and down the ballot,” NPR’s Claudia Grisales writes. Latina women are 10% more likely than their male counterparts—50% to 40%— to say they have a favorable opinion of the Democratic Party, according to research from Pew. Grisales reports that candidates all around the country—in places like Arizona, Florida, and Oregon—are uniquely targeting Latinas.

Florida Senate candidate Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, the only Latina running for US Senate this year, said, “Women will be telling their husbands, their sons, their brothers, listen, we know what we’re doing.”

Following Hinchcliffe’s comments last week, Ricky Martin, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Rita Moreno wrote in a guest essay for the Times that Puerto Rico has “a rich artistic culture and history that was overlooked and undervalued for too long.”

“You could fill Madison Square Garden every night for several decades with all the American fans of the artists born in, raised in, or nurtured by Puerto Rico,” they wrote. “Like us or not — and it’s obvious that some people really don’t like us — the threads of Puerto Rican culture are woven into our shared American story. That story speaks loudly and proudly to tens of millions of Americans.”