Eddie Moran, the Democratic mayor of the city of Reading, Pennsylvania, won his reelection to public office last year by a massive margin of four-to-one, hails from the dairy town of Hatillo, located along the north coast of Puerto Rico. He was the first Latino mayor of the fourth-largest city in the state, and to acknowledge his accomplishment, Hatillo gave him the key to their town.
Why is this important? Because former President Donald Trump has managed to pull in a whole lot of the Latino vote in this critical swing-state, just one day before the election, and this story explains how it happened and why it’s important.
Check out further details from Politico:
Reading (say it right — Reddin’) is 68.9 percent Latino, which makes it Pennsylvania’s most Latino city. However, until recent years, almost all of its elected officials were white, and both parties’ outreach to Latino residents was anemic at best. “I’ll be honest with you: At times, even though I was a registered Democrat, I felt I wasn’t totally accepted by my own party locally,” Morán said. Morán only moved to Reading in 2011, but he managed to sprint from the city’s school board to the mayor’s office with a simple strategy: He campaigned in the neighborhoods that other candidates tended to ignore. “I had to knock on more doors than anybody else,” he said. He hit the pavement in Reading’s heavily Latino urban core, cracking jokes in easy Spanglish with the Puerto Rican and Dominican families who answered their doors. It paid off: Morán won his primary against a Democratic incumbent in 2019, and he went on to win the mayor’s office in a landslide that fall. Unlike other Democrats, he opened his campaign headquarters right in the center of downtown, on the 600 block of Penn Street, where passing cars blast dembow beats and families sit down for bandeja paisa at the Cafe de Colombia across the street.
Today, that downtown office has a new tenant: Trump 2024. Morán shut down his headquarters after he won reelection last year. The Trump campaign took over the lease. Working with the Republican National Committee and the Pennsylvania GOP, the former president’s campaign opened a “Latino Americans for Trump” office in Morán’s former digs.
“Man, that was brilliant — just brilliant,” Morán went on to say, smiling and shaking his head. “I feel some kind of way about it, but, I mean, politically speaking, kudos to them, right?”
The report goes on to say that Democrats are crossing their fingers and hoping beyond hope that they have managed to get a sizable boost in this key voter block thanks to comments that were made at his Madison Square Garden rally in New York. Trump himself did not make the remarks, but a comedian get the crowd primed for the rest of the event made a wisecrack about Puerto Rico, referring to it as an “island of garbage.”
Radical leftists are hoping that the 500,000 Puerto Ricans who call Pennsylvania home might just mosey on over to the Democratic Party and cast a ballot for Kamala. Immediately after that, Trump and his campaign came out in full damage control mode and distanced themselves from the joke. However, while Harris might have tried to take advantage of the situation to pump up her campaign, Trump has been outdoing the left in the ground game department in Pennsylvania for months.
In Reading, Morán listed off recent Republican visits: A week before we talked, Trump had held a rally at the downtown Santander Arena, which had attendees lining up around the block. J.D. Vance had come through town just a few days earlier. And, in late September, Tucker Carlson had taped a segment here with Alex Jones & Jack Posobiec. Harris, meanwhile, hasn’t come to Reading since 2023, before she was at the top of the Democratic ticket. “That’s something that concerns me with the Democratic Party — I’m worried we’re not here as much,” Morán said. He did, however, compliment Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz for visiting in early October — in a smaller, invite-only event with local Latino leaders.
The future of our nation could potentially hinge on how Latinos in Pennsylvania cast their ballots. If you’re one of those people who doesn’t think your vote matters, you better reassess that line of thought. Politico notes that a lot of political pundits look to western states like Arizona and Nevada when thinking about the Latino voter block. However, over the last decade the Latino population in Pennsylvania has exploded to over 1.1 million residents with a whopping 579,000 of them eligible to vote.
While the vast majority of cities along the eastern portion of the state vote Democrat, Latinos broke with that tradition in 2020 going hard right in 2020.
In Reading, for instance, President Joe Biden won most precincts in the Latino inner-city with a healthy 50 percent lead — but, in those same precincts, turnout for Trump increased by as much as 28 percent compared to his 2016 results. Now, the Trump campaign is back with a vengeance, trying to capitalize on that momentum.
Hope for the Democrats is hanging on whether or not enough Latinos in the state believe the former president is a bigot, as polling data says that this demographic still believes they are more welcome in the Democratic Party than the GOP.
Trump himself has heavily invested in demonstrating that Latinos are welcome in the Republican Party by sharing this message with them:
Whatever you think about Trump’s crudeness on race, he’s better for the economy than Harris. And in Pennsylvania, like the rest of the country, the economy is the top issue for Latino voters; indeed, polls find issues like anti-racism rank far below kitchen-table questions like healthcare and public safety. Latinos vote strategically.
Let’s hope the messaging was effective and the Latino voters in Pennsylvania help us usher in four more years of making America great again.
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