With one week left until the election, Latin music icon Ricky Martin recently discussed the urgency of supporting Joe Biden, slamming Latino Trump supporters (including the current Puerto Rican governor) in the process.
“I’ve been supporting Biden forever,” said Martin, an out gay man, in a forthcoming episode of the Variety podcast “The Big Ticket.” “I think he is the only option we have. He is great and he has been in politics all his life. This is the moment. We all need to get together and be loud about the course of this nation.”
Martin is no stranger to being vocal about politics. He recently gave an impassioned speech at a Biden campaign event in Kissimmee, Florida alongside Eva Longoria and Luis Fonsi. He stressed the importance of making a voting plan and decried Donald Trump’s cruelty against Latinos, from his lack of a response to the 2016 Pulse shooting to his continued rhetoric against immigrants.
The 48-year-old musician also mobilized on the streets of San Juan to support the demand for former Governor Ricardo Rosselló to resign, which became a hard-won victory on behalf of Puerto Rican organizers and activists. In addition to leading a corrupt administration, Rosselló faced scrutiny for leaked messages in 2019 in which made jokes about the casualties of Hurricane Maria and made homophobic remarks specifically targeted toward Martin.
Accordingly, during the same interview Martin also dismissed current Puerto Rican Governor Wanda Vázquez Garced’s recent endorsement of Trump, stating: “She doesn’t exist. She wasn’t even elected by the people. She’s not part of this conversation.”
Martin added that the election is particularly important to him as a Latino man who is “married to an Arab,” referring to his three-year marriage to the Syrian-born painter Jwan Yosef. But he also expressed his concerns about the burgeoning Latino support for Trump’s reelection bid, which he called “really scary.”
As counterintuitive as that assertion may seem on the surface, Trump pulled 28 percent of the Latino vote in 2016 and is expected to win around 30 percent of the Latino vote next Tuesday, according to projections from NBC News. That shift could prove a key factor in the election: For the first time this year, Latinos are also the largest racial or ethnic minority in the race and will account for 13.3 percent of eligible voters, as Pew Research reports.
More complicated still is the fact that despite this record-breaking eligibility, only about half of the U.S.’s Latino population is eligible to vote, whether that’s because they’re too young or because they’re undocumented.
In addition to this demographic shift, mass numbers of early votes cast around the country mark another historic first in 2020, which Martin also commented on. “I think when you have 50 million people voting already, it’s because we are not the only ones concerned about this and for that I am extremely happy,” the singer said.
Even those gigantic numbers are a few days behind: As of the time of publication, an estimated 69 million voters have cast their votes a full week before the election, according to the Election Project. NBC News projects that 90 to 100 million early ballots could come in before November 3, and some have predicted that overall turnout could be as high as 150 million, the highest rate of participation in decades.
This record-breaking turnout is happening even despite reports of gruelingly long early voting lines which some have attributed to voter suppression.
The full episode of the podcast will be available to listen to on Nov. 3.
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