Why Puerto Ricos statehood referendum was a ploy for Democrat seats in Congress

Two weeks ago, at President-elect Donald Trump’s now infamous campaign rally in Madison Square Garden, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe made a controversial joke calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” Democrats seized upon the barb as evidence that Hinchcliffe, and by extension Trump, was racist against Puerto Ricans.A compliant press ran with the story.

 Meanwhile, the real assault on Puerto Rico was coming from Democrats themselves.In 2022, House Democrats passed the Puerto Rico Status Act, which called for a rigged referendum on statehood that mysteriously omitted the option of remaining a commonwealth.The House bill was then adopted by pro-statehood Governor Pedro Pierluisi as the template for the nonbinding referendum held on the island last week.

With its main competition off the menu, the statehood option won 56.9% of the vote. While Puerto Rico’s pro-statehood party (PNP) declared victory, much of the island saw the result as a sham.Pablo José Hernández Rivera, Puerto Rico’s newly elected Resident Commissioner, who holds a nonvoting seat in the House of Representatives, did not recognize the validity of the referendum “because it did not include the option of maintaining and improving the Commonwealth.” Every other major political party on the island had instructed their members to boycott the vote.

As a result, more than 165,000 Puerto Ricans left the ballot blank, and almost 13,000 damaged the ballots in protest.Adjusting for blank and damaged ballots, statehood’s share of the vote declined to just 47.6%. The motive behind this scheme was as transparent as it was unethical: Democrats want to make Puerto Rico a state because they believe it would add Democrats to the Senate, the House, and the Electoral College.

(The fact that 73% of the island’s voters went for Kamala Harris in their symbolic Presidential election lends credence to that theory.) House Democrats, it seems, are trying to manufacture a pro-statehood consensus...