A Florida county with the largest Puerto Rican community in the U.S. flipped 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 deeply blue and has a 56 percent Hispanic population with the largest subset being of Puerto Rican descent.
Many Democrats thought Trump would underperform with 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’s voters have not opted to elect a Republican presidential candidate since the 2004 reelection of George W. Bush.
After years of voting heavily for Democratic presidents, the county voted red for Trump by about 13 points, according to Florida’s election watch tracker.
In 2020, Joe Biden won the county by 13.8 percent and in 2016 Democrat Hillary Clinton won with a commanding 24.8 percent.
Trump’s win is even more astounding considering there are 20,257 more registered Democrats than registered Republicans in Osceola, according to the local supervisor of elections website.
There are, however, 86,373 registered independents, which is just 325 more than the amount of Democrats in the county.
Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe was the opener at Trump’s midtown Manhattan rally just over a weekend before the 2024 Election day.
Liberal media was ready to declare Trump’s campaign – and Hinchcliffe’s career – death after backlash ensued in the Hispanic community over the joke he made about Puerto Rico.
But it turns out that Trump performed much better than expected with this key voting demographic.
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, which makes it the county with the largest population per capita of Americans of either Puerto Rican descent or naturalized after moving to mainland at 26.69 percent.
In every single state – even those that voted blue this year – Trump improved his support among the U.S. electorate from 2020.
And many counties that have voted blue in every election in recent years, the former president was able to gain back support to the right.
Florida was once a swing state but is now solidly red – a fact that was further cemented in Tuesday’s election.
Besides flipping 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.