A Florida county with the largest Puerto Rican community in the United States turned red for Donald Trump for the first time in two decades.
The Trump-Vance ticket received 56.1 percent of the vote in Osceola County, Florida, in Tuesday’s election. The area just south of Orlando is deep blue and has a 56 percent Hispanic population, with the largest subset being of Puerto Rican descent.
Many Democrats thought Trump would underperform among Hispanic voters, especially Puerto Ricans, after a comedian at his Madison Square Garden rally compared the U.S. territory to a “floating island of garbage.”
Osceola voters have not chosen to elect a Republican presidential candidate since George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004.
After years of voting heavily for Democratic presidents, the county voted red for Trump by about 13 points. according to Florida election surveillance tracker.
Donald Trump surpassed the US county with the largest number of Puerto Ricans in the 2024 presidential election for the first time in two decades
Osceola County, Florida, has the largest Puerto Rican population by percentage
In 2020, Joe Biden won the county by 13.8 percent and in 2016, Democrat Hillary Clinton won by a commanding 24.8 percent.
Trump’s victory is even more surprising considering there are 20,257 more registered Democrats than registered Republicans in Osceola, according to the local supervisor of elections website.
However, there are 86,373 registered independents, only 325 more than the number of Democrats in the county.
Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe opened Trump’s rally in midtown Manhattan just over a weekend before Election Day 2024.
The liberal media was ready to declare Trump’s campaign – and Hinchcliffe’s career – dead after a backlash ensued in the Hispanic community over a joke he made about Puerto Rico.
But it turns out that Trump performed much better than expected with this key demographic of voters.
According to a CNN exit poll, Trump received 45 percent of the Hispanic vote.
A Daily Mail analysis looks at the 116,839 Puerto Ricans living in Osceola, making it the county with the largest per capita population of Americans of Puerto Rican descent or naturalized after moving to the mainland at 26.69 percent.
Democrats expected Donald Trump to lose support among the Hispanic community after comedian Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” at the Madison Square Garden rally just over a week before Election Day.
In every state – even those that voted blue this year – Trump improved his support among the American electorate from 2020.
And in many counties that voted blue in every election in recent years, the former president was able to regain support from the right.
Florida was once a swing state, but is now solidly red, a fact that was further cemented in Tuesday’s election.
In addition to defeating Osceola, Trump also turned Miami-Dade red in the 2024 election by an 11-point margin of victory: 55 percent to 44 percent. In 2020, Biden won by 7 percentage points.