A poll covered by Politico in 2019 asked 600 Puerto Rican voters in Florida a range of political questions, including, “If the United States Congress offered Puerto Rico statehood, would you support it?” 77% of respondents to the Florida poll said yes.
In other questions, 85% said that Congress should respect Puerto Rico’s repeated votes for statehood.
Respondents also said they would be more likely to support a political candidate who endorses statehood. When questions specified that statehood would mean “that Puerto Rican citizens in the Island are represented with their own voting members of Congress and the same civil and political rights as all other U.S. citizens,” support for such a candidate rose to 81%.
80% said that candidates’ positions on statehood were important in their decisions on how to vote in elections in Florida.
Related questions
In another question on the poll, 53% of those surveyed agreed that “[t]he inferior treatment by Republicans and Democrats in Congress to Puerto Ricans in the Island is a reflection of what they think of me as a Puerto Rican in Florida.”
A majority also agreed that “Puerto Rico’s status as a Commonwealth and not a U.S. State is the underlying cause for the Island’s current crisis and living conditions.”
Stateside Puerto Ricans’ views
Other polls of Puerto Rico’s diaspora coming out of Florida have shown the same basic outcomes: Florida’s Puerto Rican community supports statehood and also supports political candidates who do the same.
Surveys of Puerto Ricans in New York find that the majority there also support statehood, although with less intensity than in Florida. For example, a poll in New York asking the same question about supporting statehood brought in a two-thirds majority rather than the greater-than-three-quarters majority found in Florida. Nonetheless, statehood was clearly the majority position in both cases, as well as in all the status votes on the Island in this century and polling among Americans in general.
In both the surveys shown on the chart above, the question asked specifically about a situation in which Congress offered statehood. This happened for Hawaii, for example. President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Hawaii Statehood Admission bill in March of 1959 and in June, the people of Hawaii voted to accept the offer. This has not always been the process for admitting new states. The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power two admit new states, but doesn’t go into detail on the steps for doing so.
Note, however, that different questions about statehood had different responses.
- Question 11 asked, “If the United States Congress offered Puerto Rico statehood, would you support it?” and 77% said yes.
- Question 15 asked, “Do you favor or oppose statehood now for Puerto Rico, so that Puerto Rican citizens in the Island are represented with their own voting members of Congress and the same civil and political rights as all other U.S. citizens?” and 81% said they favored statehood.
It appears that the results of statehood were more compelling than the process of attaining statehood for the individuals surveyed.
The post Florida Polling and Puerto Rico Statehood Support: A History appeared first on PUERTO RICO REPORT.
