Talk about fitting.

In an election where Donald Trump scored an impressive increase in his numbers among minorities despite the media making a scandal mountain out of a molehill over a joke about Puerto Rico told at one of Trump’s rallies, a pro-Trump candidate seems likely to prevail in the unlikeliest of places: Puerto Rico.

According to The Associated Press, Jenniffer González — a Trump-supporting member of Puerto Rico’s pro-statehood party — leads the race to secure a spot in the governor’s mansion on Wednesday, with 39 percent of the vote in a four-way race.

With 91 percent of the precincts reporting, she holds a six-point advantage over Juan Dalmau, running for the Independence Party and Citizen Victory Movement.

While this marks the first time that someone who isn’t from the two major parties in Puerto Rico — González’s New Progressive Party and the Popular Democratic Party, which wants Puerto Rico to remain a territory — to finish in the top two in the gubernatorial balloting, it appears not to be enough, although no victor has yet been called.

“I’m going to be a governor for all Puerto Ricans,” González said in remarks on Tuesday.

Thanks to the vagaries of the politics of Puerto Rico, neither party has an especially fixed political philosophy, at least the way the two major national parties do. So, while the current governor, New Progressive Party member Pedro Pierluisi, is an ardent Democrat, that’s likely to take a U-turn if González wins.

“González has served as resident commissioner since 2016. Unlike Pierluisi, who is a Democrat who supported Vice President Kamala Harris, González is a lifelong Republican who supported now-President-elect Donald Trump,” NBC News noted.

“It is now evident why I continued to support him,” González said. “Puerto Rico cannot afford to be immersed in a dispute with the person who signs the checks and makes decisions over our territory.”

This is in spite of the fact that — as you doubtlessly know if you’ve been anywhere near a TV these past few weeks — you know that the Democratic Party tried to make huge hay out of a remark by a roast comedian at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally that Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage.”

The media ran with that ball as far as they could go. Boricua celebrities like Bad Bunny and Jennifer Lopez were brought out in the closing days in the campaign to rally the Hispanic vote in general, and the Puerto Rican vote in particular, to come out and vote against the evil orange man — who hadn’t even said the words, mind you, although they weren’t at all clear on that.

Ads like these played non-stop on Spanish-language outlets:

Harris campaign up with new TV ad this morning – first airing in North Carolina – referencing comedian Tony Hinchcliffe at Trump’s MSG rally calling Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage”:
“This November 5th, Trump will understand that some people’s trash is others’ treasure” pic.twitter.com/PQ2BdwF89j

— David Wright (@DavidWright_7) October 31, 2024

And what happened? Not only has Puerto Rico, of all places, elected a pro-Trump governor, but it turns out that Hispanic voters in general, and Puerto Rican voters in particular, voted for Trump in bigger numbers than in 2020.

On CNN Wolf Blitzer realizes that the Tony Hinchcliffe Puerto Rico garbage joke not only *didn’t* negatively affect the Trump vote, his numbers in the Puerto Rican community actually went up. Way up. pic.twitter.com/ND8Dgjfc5P

— Erich Hartmann (@erichhartmann) November 6, 2024

Whoops.

Exit polls showed that Latino men backed Trump by a 54 percent to 44 percent margin, a massive turnaround from 2020 when Biden won that demographic 59 percent to 36 percent in 2020, according to USA Today.

Now, it’s worth noting that just because a pro-Trump governor is likely to take office in Puerto Rico still doesn’t make a compelling case for statehood, which she will push for; the “Years Without a Major Fiscal or Governmental Crisis” workplace counter in the island territory is still reliably stuck at zero, and it’s fair to say that the number displayed on it should at least reach double-digits before we start having serious discussions about it becoming the 51st state — even if it’s not as reliably Democrat as pro-statehood Democrats might have hoped.

That being said, it’s one last bit of perfect irony that one of the last flips the GOP might make this election cycle will be in San Juan. After all that effort to make a nothingburger a somethingburger, the Democrats ended up with even less than nothing.

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