OPINION:
Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a long-time friend and fundraiser to the Clinton family, will announce Monday a plan to restore the voting rights of 200,000 felons in the state — right in time for the November election.
This is despite the Supreme Court last month, which stopped his wide-reaching clemency act for being overly broad.
So now the governor has plans to individually grant clemency to the 200,000 felons using an autopen to individually sign orders restoring their rights. He promised to do the first 13,000 within a week and all 200,000 within two, The Washington Post reported this weekend.
According to The Post’s poll of Virginians, a good number are skeptical about the timing — as they should be. Forty-five percent polled say Mr. McAuliffe did it because he thinks it is the right thing to do, while 42 percent say he did it because it would help Democrats win elections. More than 7 in 10 Republicans say Mr. McAuliffe’s action was in an effort to boost his party’s chances.
Well, no duh.
Mr. McMuliffe’s initial ruling was done in such haste that it included granting clemency to 132 sex offenders still in custody and several murderers being held in probation in other states.
But no worries, he’ll have everything cleaned up by November.
In Florida, it’s the Puerto Rican vote that could be the clincher for Mrs. Clinton.
Each week, as many as 1,000 Puerto Ricans arrive in central Florida, according to some estimates, joining a community of more than 1 million Puerto Ricans across the state that has grown tenfold since 1980, the Los Angeles Times reported in March.
As U.S. citizens, Puerto Ricans are easy to register to vote, and groups that are supportive of Mrs. Clinton, such as Mi Familia Vota [My Family Votes], are scurrying around the state to get them on the rolls. The group said it’s registered 3,000 new voters in central Florida since March, and there’s no signs of it slowing down.
The Puerto Rican vote could tip the scales for Mrs. Clinton this election cycle as President Obama won Florida by a razor-thin margin of 50 percent to 49.1 percent in 2012.
“It’s a potential game-changer for the state,” Mark Hugo Lopez, director of Hispanic Research at the Pew Research Center, told the Christian Science Monitor. “It’s the biggest movement of people out of Puerto Rico since the great migration of the 1950s.”
The immigration surge is being fueled by the island’s economic crisis and the promise of U.S. benefits, including Social Security, food-stamps, welfare and housing assistance.
“Puerto Rican voters have completely upended the understanding of how the state is going to vote in November,” Fernand Amandi, a Florida pollster, told the Los Angeles Times. “They could wake up in San Juan, have breakfast and be registered to vote in the U.S. come dinnertime. You see both parties doing a full-court press to win over what could very well be the decisive vote.”
Because the majority of these voters lean Democratic, it’s Mrs. Clinton and her affiliates who are doing most of the outreach.
“If you go back 20 years, the Hispanic vote could be summed up by a few words: exile-era Cubans,” said Steve Schale, a Democratic consultant who helped Obama win Florida in 2008, told the Los Angeles Times. Competition for their votes “came down to who most hated Fidel Castro.”
Now, he said new Latino voters are overwhelmingly voting as Democrats, although many register as nonparty voters, whose ranks in the state have surged by about 600,000 over the last four years, the Los Angeles Times reported.
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