How Florida's 1 million Puerto Ricans could influence the presidential race

KISSIMMEE, Florida — On a recent Friday night, as diners welcomed the weekend, two taverns on the same street in this Central Florida city highlighted the changing demographics taking hold here.

At the first, the 3 Sisters Speakeasy, a solo guitarist with long blond hair strummed John Mellencamp’s 1982 hit, “Jack and Diane,” while a mostly White clientele listened halfheartedly over beers and burgers.

“Oh yeah, life goes on,” twanged the singer, Clint Stewart, “Long after the thrill, of livin’ is gone.”

Over at the newly opened Hatfield’s Bar and Grill, a 2-minute walk away, the contrast couldn’t have been sharper. With the lights dimmed nightclub style, a DJ in a black cap spun Afro-influenced salsa, merengue and bachata over a heart-pounding sound system.

At one point, the DJ, Edgar “Chino” Ramos, leaned into a microphone and yelled proudly to the mostly Latino customers, “the Puerto Ricans are taking over!”

To some, especially those still clinging to the 1980s, it must feel that way.

Puerto Ricans are pouring into Florida by the thousands each month.

Some are cold-weather refugees heading south from northeastern states and Chicago, where Ramos, the DJ, is from.

Many more are fleeing Puerto Rico to escape the island’s economic turmoil and massive debt crisis.

Since 2000, the Puerto Rican population in Florida has doubled to more than 1 million, according to the Pew Research Center. At that rate, Florida will soon surpass New York as the state with the largest Puerto Rican population in the U.S.

Adding to the state’s already fast-growing and increasingly diverse Latino population, Puerto Ricans are now the second largest Latino group in Florida behind Cubans, according to census data.

They are also quickly becoming a formidable political force, especially in the Orlando area, where the vast majority of Puerto Ricans have settled.

That’s because Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, not immigrants, and are eligible to register to vote as soon as they arrive from the U.S. commonwealth.

As voters, they lean Democratic.

In 2014 in Osceola County, which includes Kissimmee, a rise in Democratic voters fueled by an increase in the Puerto Rican population helped Democrats take control of the Board of Commissioners, 4-1, especially notable since that same year Republicans beat out Democrats at state and national levels all across the rest of the country.

While already felt at the local level, the Puerto Rican political influence could translate to the state and national level as well.

Florida is a crucial battleground state in general elections, and Puerto Ricans could play a pivotal role in the outcome of this year’s presidential race by further tilting Florida’s political landscape to the left — similar to the way earlier waves of anti-Castro Republican-leaning Cubans in South Florida helped move the state’s political needle toward the right.

Still, it remains to be seen whether Puerto Ricans will live up to their political potential.

A migration south 

Once a sleepy cattle town, and later a destination for retirees, Kissimmee now has one of the fastest-growing Puerto Rican populations in Florida.

In fact, there are now more Latinos than non-Hispanic Whites.

At Osceola High School, where 27-year-old Lauren O’Neill attended, “we were the minority,” she said. The restaurant server and part-time college student born and raised in Kissimmee was having a drink at 3 Sisters Speakeasy with 24-year-old Dustin Romack, a bartender and aspiring singer also from Kissimmee.

The two friends both identified themselves as registered Republicans, but they don’t pay much attention to politics and haven’t been following the presidential race.

So why then do they consider themselves Republican?

“To be honest, I followed my parents,” O’Neill said.

“Yeah, same,” Romack added.

Meanwhile, Latinos now make up about 62 percent of the city’s 63,392 population, and about half of the Latinos are Puerto Rican.

Though not immigrants, Puerto Ricans identify with other Hispanics, and in general support immigration reforms to allow undocumented immigrants to gain legal status, according to Edwin Melendez, director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York.

“We consider ourselves Latinos,” Melendez said. “We look a lot like other Latino immigrants.”

He noted that one of the most vocal supporters of immigration reform in Congress is U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez, a Democrat from Illinois, is Puerto Rican.

Even so, as U.S. citizens, some Puerto Ricans are resentful of immigrants who come to the U.S. illegally.

Maria Malave, 32, who moved from Puerto Rico to Kissimmee in 2009, is leaning toward voting for Hillary Clinton, but she said her husband, an Iraq war veteran, supports Donald Trump because of the tough stance he has taken on illegal immigration.

“He has a big problem with immigrants, not the immigrants, the illegal immigrants,” Malave said of her husband, one morning while she worked at the front desk of a motel.

Where ethnicity may trump party affiliation

On a recent Friday, Chino Ramos spun Latin music until 2 a.m. at Hatfield’s Bar and Grill. The tavern is owned by another Puerto Rican from Chicago, David Morales.

The next morning, Ramos headed over to the small mini-market he runs and named after his wife, Maria’s Grand Central Station.

The store, part of the Amtrak station platform, sells products that appeal to the area’s growing Puerto Rican community, as well as to travelers who are also increasingly Puerto Rican.

“Pasteles, alcapurrias, pastelillos, Coco Rico, Champagne Kola, Malta India, that kind of stuff,” Ramos said later, sitting in his spacious living room overlooking Lake Tohopekaliga. Outside, two red-headed cranes pecked the ground under a palm tree.

The 64-year-old Ramos was born in Puerto Rico, but grew up in Humboldt Park, the heart of Chicago’s large Puerto Rican community.

His family was part of the first big Puerto Rican migration to the U.S. in 1950s and '60s.

“Some of us went to New York and some of us came to Chicago,” Ramos recalled.

Now he is part of the newest wave hitting Florida, after he and his wife left Chicago for the Kissimmee area in 2000, seeking sunshine, new economic opportunities and a milder climate for a now deceased son with cerebral palsy and spina bifida.

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In Chicago, Ramos was active in Democratic politics, supporting former Mayor Richard M. Daley.

In Kissimmee’s upcoming mayoral race, Ramos is backing Art Otero, an Army veteran who is also Puerto Rican.

Otero is one of two Latino city commissioners vying to become Kissimmee’s first Hispanic mayor.

The second is 51-year-old real-estate agent Jose Alvarez, who was born in Cuba and raised in Miami.

Otero and Alvarez are both former Republicans who are now registered Democrats in an area where it is becoming increasingly difficult for Republicans to win.

But in Kissimmee’s nonpartisan mayoral race, ethnicity may play a bigger role than party affiliation.

“The Puerto Ricans are not going to let a Cuban become the first Latino mayor of Kissimmee,” Ramos said, adding later in Spanish, “We aren’t in Miami. ... We are in Kissimmee, Florida, in the heart of the Puerto Rican neighborhood.”

Ramos’s comments show the ethnic partisanship some Puerto Ricans are injecting into Central Florida’s political landscape. Alvarez, the Cuban American running for mayor, has taken note.

He moved to Kissimmee in 1997 with his family and is running under the campaign slogan, “One Kissimmee for all.” The slogan is pasted on the rear window of his pickup truck.

It's a subtle message intended to bridge the gap with non-Latinos as well as the city’s diverse Latino population that also includes Colombians, Mexicans, Dominicans and Venezuelans.

“There is a little bit over 65,000 residents in the city of Kissimmee and I represent them all no matter who they are or where they came from or their ethnic background,” Alvarez said as he puffed on a hand-rolled Nicaraguan cigar inside a local cigar shop.

Otero said he too is running to represent all of Kissimmee’s diverse community. But he acknowledges “100 percent” that as Puerto Rican, “yes, I have a big advantage.”

The impact of the Puerto Rican vote  

The influence of Puerto Rican voters in places like Kissimmee could sway the presidential race in Florida, with its 29 electoral votes, more than all but two states, California and Texas, and tied with New York.

Ramos, for example, is a die-hard Clinton supporter.

In fact, Puerto Ricans tend vote about two-thirds Democratic and one-third Republican, said Melendez, the Hunter College researcher.

What’s more, Puerto Ricans already make up make up 21 percent of the state’s 4.7 million Latino population and are gaining ground on Cubans, the largest, at 29 percent.

President Barack Obama won Florida in 2008 and again in 2012, in part due to support from the state’s diverse Latino population, which has diluted the political influence of the Republican-leaning Cuban American vote.

Prior to that, Republican candidates won Florida in every presidential election dating back to 1980, with the exception of Bill Clinton in 1996.

But there are differences within the Puerto Rican community that make it difficult to predict how they will vote, and give Republicans hope that they will be able to tap into that surging population, and Latino voters in general.

“A lot of Hispanics have Republican values but they don’t know it," said Mark Oxner, 54, chairman of the Osceola County Republican Executive Committee. His wife, Amparo, is from Panama, and is the former chairman of the local Republican executive committee. “A lot of Hispanics in this area are very socially conservative.”

Otero agreed. Puerto Ricans from the northeast and Chicago are often closely tied to the Democratic Party, but those coming from the island tend to be more conservative, he said.

“That’s a fact,” said Otero, an evangelical Christian who grew up in Puerto Rico. “On the island they are a little more conservative than liberal and there are a lot of moderates. But then the people coming from the north are more liberal.”

He switched to the Democratic party three years ago after he became dissatisfied with the GOP’s tough stance on issues such as immigration and health care.

Many of the Puerto Ricans moving to Florida are registering as independents, Otero said. In Osceola County, the number of voters registered as nonpartisan, or independent, exceeds the number of Republicans, 54,419 to 42,306, according to Osceola County elections officials. Registered Democrats are the largest group with 70,863.

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Still, while Puerto Ricans continue to surge into Central Florida, it’s uncertain whether they will live up to their voting potential.

The island has one of the highest voting rates in the world, traditionally above 80 percent.

But in the U.S., only about 25 percent to 30 percent of eligible Puerto Ricans vote, said researcher Melendez.

“That’s an interesting paradox,” he said.

For one, Puerto Ricans coming from the island are often unfamiliar with the two-party system in the U.S. The election cycle is also different. In Puerto Rico, there are only elections every four years.

Eric Lopez said he hasn’t spent much time learning about the difference between Democrats and Republicans since he moved to Kissimmee in 2011 from San Juan, the island's capital.

“I’m straight up not interested,” the 21-year-old said, moments after finishing his maintenance shift at the Satisfaction Orlando Resort, a motel in Kissimmee.

The only presidential candidates he had heard of were Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

“Donald Trump, everybody knows about him,” Lopez said.

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Back at the 3 Sisters Speakeasy, the owner, Felix Ortiz sat at a table waiting for the dinner crowd to arrive. The 41-year-old Ortiz was born in Newark, N.J., moved to Puerto Rico when he was 11 and then moved back to the United States when he was 20.

He was hired to run the restaurant’s kitchen in March 2013. Four months later, the owner, Ray Parsons, who owns nearly a dozen buildings in Kissimmee’s historic district, asked him to become managing partner. In October, Parsons sold the restaurant to Ortiz.

Ortiz has gradually added Latin dishes to the menu, including tacos and a Cuban sandwich. More than 350 people showed up for Latin festival the restaurant hosted last summer to commemorate Puerto Rico’s Constitution Day on July 25.

The restaurant’s clientele, however, remains mostly White, and Ortiz admits he is unfamiliar with most of the cover songs the musicians he hires perform on Friday and Saturday nights, including John Mellencamp’s "Jack and Diane."

So what does Ortiz do when he is done working for the night at his own restaurant? He strolls over to Hatfield's, where he takes a seat at the bar, orders a beer and listens to some salsa.

Editor’s note

The 2016 presidential election will be decisive when it comes to the nation’s broken immigration system. The campaign has again reminded us of the powerful emotions the immigration debate can provoke. The Arizona Republic sent reporters and photographers to five influential presidential-nominating states to find out what this campaign season will mean for the future of American immigration. Read more at immigration.azcentral.com.

One Nation: Phoenix

One Nation, which draws on the combined power of the nationwide USA Today Network, will stop in Phoenix on March 21 for a discussion of immigration with experts from here and across the nation. Get your tickets now for food, beer, bands and knowledge at onenation.usatoday.com and continue reading The Arizona Republic’s coverage of the issue at immigration.azcentral.com.