Trump’s attacks are likely to get the attention of thousands of Puerto Rican voters whose growing numbers in Florida could be pivotal in 2020, said Susan MacManus, a University of South Florida political scientist.
“This is a state where elections turn on less than one-half of 1 percent,” she said. “And the largest cache of new voters is in that community. Why is he picking this fight now?”…
About 70 percent of Puerto Ricans in Florida have a “bad” or “very bad” opinion of Trump, according to a poll released in June by Florida International University and the Puerto Rican Alliance of Florida, a nonprofit. Only 18 percent had a positive view of the president, the poll of 1,000 Florida-based Puerto Ricans found…
One former senior Republican official in Puerto Rico noted that Democrats would seek to use “unforced political errors” by Trump to hurt the GOP’s chances in Florida in 2020. The official, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, said that while Trump and a Republican-led Congress passed record funding for hurricane relief in 2017, the distribution of the funds has been “extremely slow.”
