Harris campaign spends final hours reminding Pennsylvania of a Trump ally's joke about Puerto Rico

Source: AP

Updated 10:23 PM EST, November 4, 2024


READING, Pa. (AP) — The day before Election Day, 17-year-old girl Carmen Hernandez held a cardboard sign with the Puerto Rican flag outside Trump’s rally in Reading, Pennsylvania, a city that is two-thirds Hispanic. “What you call trash is our treasure,” the sign read.

While Trump’s campaign had quickly distanced itself from a comic’s slam on Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage,” Kamala Harris’ campaign and other Democrats spent the last hours of the 2024 campaign in the nation’s largest battleground state linking him to the joke.

Harris devoted much of her final full day on the campaign trail to reaching Latino voters in Pennsylvania, a swing state that Democrats consider part of their “blue wall” in the Electoral College. She made multiple stops in what is known as the 222 Corridor, after the highway that connects small cities and towns west and north of Philadelphia.

More than 315,000 people who are 18 and older identify as Puerto Ricans in Pennsylvania. And in a state where small margins could decide who gets 19 votes in the Electoral College, that community could be crucial for both Democrats, who are seeking to hold onto voters who have long favored their party, and Republicans, who are trying to make further inroads among this demographic.

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/puerto-ricans-floating-island-garbage-trump-harris-608518cfb3276b0a67fd52d1cbe2a190