Will Clinton or Obama be voted off the island?

Puerto Rico may not provide Hillary Clinton with a national popular vote victory, much less those extra half-million votes Rob Reiner was talking about.

By Mike Madden

Read more: Democratic Party, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Politics, News, Barack Obama, 2008 election, Mike Madden

Reuters / Ana Martinez

Sen. Hillary Clinton speaks during a campaign event in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on May 25.

May 31, 2008 | SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico -- Even before the fireworks started, you could hear the political rally Thursday night from blocks away. Two live salsa bands alternated with a catchy jingle blaring from the speakers. The emcee exhorted the crowd -- all dressed in the official campaign colors -- to help put their candidate in a position of power in Washington. Police closed off the surrounding streets. There was free food. No question about it: Everybody was ready to get out there and vote.

Unfortunately for both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the rally in downtown San Juan wasn't for either one of them. The catchy jingle was for Alfredo Salazar, the Popular Democratic Party's candidate for Puerto Rico's nonvoting "resident commissioner" in the U.S. House of Representatives. As was the emcee's fervent shout, "Tell your neighbor -- with Salazar in Congress, we'll achieve progress!" The candidate's banners declared, "For Puerto Rico, for your wallet -- the man of action in Washington!"

The whole rally was geared toward an event a little further down the line than Sunday's Democratic primary: the Nov. 4 general election, to be precise, in which Puerto Ricans can't vote for president but do have two hot local races to settle.

While the primary and its 55 delegates may be crucial for Clinton in particular -- she wants to win big amid heavy turnout to help edge Obama in the overall popular vote -- it could wind up being mostly an afterthought in Puerto Rican political culture. Centered on the island's status as a U.S. territory, local politics only vaguely matches up with the raging right-versus-left battles of the mainland. Many members of the two biggest political parties here, the PDP and the New Progressive Party, would consider themselves Democrats, not Republicans, but most voters don't waste much time thinking about either of the national parties. (Nearly all of Puerto Rico's few Republicans are members of the NPP.) Leaders of both local blocs are split between Clinton and Obama, and the mayors of some of the island's biggest cities are Republicans who aren't interested in the primary, so the powerful electoral machines that turn out Puerto Ricans in numbers that would shame even the most civic-minded U.S. states for the commonwealth's general elections (nearly 82 percent in 2004) won't be working at anything close to full blast.

Here's how confused the local-national relationship is: Both Salazar and his NPP rival for resident commissioner, Pedro Pierluisi, have endorsed Obama. Pierluisi is Obama's campaign co-chairman here, and someone in Salazar's entourage flashed an Obama banner from the stage Thursday night, the only real sign at the rally that there was another election to worry about before the November showdown.

So even though Hillary, Bill and Chelsea Clinton have spent enough time wandering around Puerto Rico over the last few weeks that you could easily confuse them with tourists who got a good rate on a family vacation package, it's looking like the turnout for Sunday's primary won't hit the mark Clinton needs to take a lead in the popular vote before the Democratic campaign finally lurches to an end on Tuesday. She may not even win with the kind of blowout margin that she's racked up in recent primaries in West Virginia and Kentucky, despite her familiarity among islanders built by Bill's eight years in the White House and her seven years representing more than a million nuyoricans in the Senate.

Some Clinton backers had been counting on Puerto Rico as a popular-vote mother lode, with its 2.4 million voters giving Hillary enough of a plurality to change the conversation, however briefly. As Clinton surrogate Rob Reiner said in April, "People don't understand that Puerto Rico has a lot of voters ... We can pick up 400,000-500,000 there with the popular vote."

That kind of number could give Clinton a national popular-vote victory over Obama even without including Florida's votes. But that number depends on both a turnout and a Clinton margin that may not be achievable. Clinton supporters have grasped at the fact that 2 million voters showed up for the commonwealth's 2004 gubernatorial election and at the lopsided margins among Latino voters in earlier primaries. But a poll in Wednesday's El Vocero newspaper put Clinton up just 51 to 38 in Puerto Rico, and 50 percent of the respondents said they didn't plan to vote at all. Even counting Florida's outlaw primary, Obama leads Clinton by 163,000 votes nationwide, so she needs to win by more than 16 points, with turnout topping 1 million, to make up that ground on Sunday.

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