For David Torres, a former GOP ward leader in Philadelphia who is now running as an independent, the comment was “very stupid.” He said Trump and his campaign should have immediately disavowed the comments on stage that evening.

Torres, a Trump supporter, said the comments were not a “deal” for him because he believed in Trump’s other policies and because a senior campaign adviser said “The joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”

“I think he should separate himself or be honest with the community,” Torres said of Trump. “He has a lot of good things. I believe in him more than in (Kamala). I think she has a lot of faults and that I don’t like, but at the same time, you have to take responsibility.

He wanted Trump to apologize to the community at his Tuesday night rally in Allentown, a city where Puerto Ricans live. about 9% of the population.

Trump did not apologize for Hinchcliffe’s comment. Instead, he claimed that he had “done more for Puerto Rico than any president from afar. »

‘I’m so proud that we’re getting support from Latinos like never before,’ Trump said.

Fuentes said she knows people who “stick to their positions and basically say it doesn’t matter…that they would vote for Trump, that it doesn’t matter, that it was a joke.

But Morales, Vazquez and other Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia working to support Harris said that among many undecided Puerto Ricans they know, the comments tipped the scales.

“A lot of people weren’t going to vote,” Morales said, adding that now it’s a different story. She said her phone was ringing non-stop.

“We have all these people, they’ve now made up their minds, they’ve had enough, and now they’re coming out, and they came out yesterday and voted,” she said. “They went out and voted early because they knew today was the last day, and this is the last day for early voting. They came out and said, “Well, we help Puerto Ricans and we help Latinos. And we came and we voted because we’re taking out the trash now, we’re not waiting for November 5th.’

Vazquez said she hopes more Puerto Ricans are now motivated to vote, especially in Pennsylvania, where they number in the hundreds of thousands — far greater than Biden’s 2020 margin of victory in the state of around 80,000 votes.

“I hope that… that’s what’s most important about voting, that not that you’re calling, that you’re not in your house, that you can vote to demonstrate that if we are important, we are valuable,” he said. she declared.

“I hope that… it will make it more important for them to get out and vote, to not be silent, not to stay in their house, to get out and vote to show them that we are important, that we matter,” she declared.