By The Star Staff
In analyzing the performance of the Popular Democratic Party (PDP) in the 2024 election, PDP President Jesús Manuel Ortiz González, the pro-commonwealth party’s candidate for governor, said the party’s third-place position resulted from a protest vote against Puerto Rico’s heretofore only other major political force, the New Progressive Party (NPP), that led to an incorrect maneuver.
For the first time in its history, the PDP finished behind perennial also-ran the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP) in a governor’s race.
“I am leaving this contest without any accusations about my character, without any accusations about my career as a public official,” Ortiz González said at a press conference. “It was a protest vote trying to defeat a government, but it turned out to be wrong and we anticipated that. The one who had the political structure and the team to be able to execute a government agenda was the Popular Democratic Party, and the result is what happened here. So I can tell you with complete conviction that even the polls they used to support the narrative presented me as the candidate with the best numbers in personal terms of what the voters think about me.”
He said the results were the result of a mistaken narrative that led many people, including PDP voters, to think that the correct vote to stop four more years of the NPP was a vote for the Alliance between the PIP and the Citizen Victory Movement (MVC).
“And it turned out that it was not like that, and we anticipated it,” said Ortiz González, who as of Wednesday afternoon, according to the State Elections Commission’s most recent available report on the vote count, had garnered 21%, with 233,470 votes.
He said the PDP will analyze the results, find ways to correct what was done wrong and learn from past mistakes.
Pablo José Hernández Rivera of the PDP, the apparent resident commissioner-elect, stated that “the opposition vote was diluted by the mistaken impression that the useful vote that could defeat Jenniffer [González Colón, the NPP gubernatorial candidate] was a vote in favor of [PIP-MVC Alliance candidate] Juan Dalmau.”
“And today, we saw that this was wrong and the result is that the opposition has been fragmented,” he said.
Ortiz González contended that the result achieved by Dalmau Ramírez, on track to be the runner-up to González Colón in the governor’s race, cannot be attributed to the so-called Alliance or the PIP.
“Here we have the possibility of a candidate who is running under the PIP coming in second,” Ortiz González said. “It is not the PIP, it is not even the Alliance. Because the legislators did not manage to get elected. That is the reality. San Juan [mayoral candidate of the Alliance, Manuel Natal] did not, apparently, either. Here, there was a phenomenon of a candidate and a narrative was established and I always said that the protest vote did not necessarily generate a change. I also said that this vote would help the NPP win.”
“An analysis is to be done after finishing the whole process. I responsibly believe that we have to do an introspection, but that introspection has to be done when we have all the results on the table,” Ortiz González added. “There is still a lot to count and many votes that have been counted for us, but I am not one of those who hide the sun with my hand. There is a challenge; there is an analysis, an examination, and an introspection that we have to do as an institution, and as president of the party, I am going to promote, and I am going to make sure that this happens.”
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